Shaun Richman

Janus v. AFSCME, which begins oral arguments on February 26, is the culmination of a years-long right-wing plot to financially devastate public-sector unions. And a Supreme Court ruling against AFSCME would indeed have that effect, by banning public-sector unions from collecting mandatory fees from the workers they are compelled to represent. But if the Court embraces the weaponization of free speech as a cudgel to beat up on unions, the possibility of other, unintended consequences is beginning to excite some union advocates and stir fear among conservative constitutional scholars.

The ruling could both wildly increase workers’ bargaining power and clog the lower courts with First Amendment challenges to routine uses of taxpayer money. At a minimum, it has the potential to turn every public sector workplace dispute into a constitutional controversy—and one Midwest local is already laying plans to maximize the chaos this could cause.

Toward labor’s bill of rights

From the earliest court decision dealing with workers’ protest activity—the 1806 Cordwainers Trial in Philadelphia–courts have strenuously avoided applying the First Amendment to unions. Instead, conservative courts treated unions as criminal conspiracies that interfered with employers’ property and contract rights.

I have been arguing that unions and their allies should be challenging the most unequal aspects of labor law as violations of our constitutional rights. Currently, employers in the private sector have a legal right to force employees to attend mandatory anti-union presentations, on penalty of firing. Workers can also be fired for making “disloyal” statements, even in the course of otherwise protected concerted activity. Meanwhile, the government has restricted the scope of issues that unions can legally compel employers to bargain over.

All of these practices are vulnerable to First Amendment challenges as government restrictions of workers’ speech. They become more vulnerable if the Supreme Court rules in Janus that every interaction that a union has with a governmental subdivision is inherently political.

Even more vulnerable are anti-union laws in the public sector. Take Scott Walker’s Act 10, which forbids unions from making bargaining proposals over anything other than wages that don’t exceed the cost of living. Or the New Jersey case law that forbids teachers unions from even proposing restrictions on class size. How are those not explicit restrictions on workers’ speech?

The most common objection to this kind of thinking on the Left is that a judiciary that could buy such a craven argument as Janus will refuse to take the precedent to its logical conclusion and shamelessly waving away workers’ free speech rights. That may be true, but there is a decent chance that the next couple of federal elections could bring a “blue wave” that will alter the ideological make-up of the courts for decades. Janus could hand new liberal majorities a roadmap for restoring a legal balance of power between corporations and workers. It’s enough of a possibility that conservative legal scholars have begun paying attention to the case, and they see the potential peril for their cause.

Every workplace dispute, a constitutional controversy

Amicus briefs in the Janus case have been rolling in since the summer. These briefs are filed by scholars and organizations who are not parties in the case, but who nevertheless have strong opinions about its outcome. They may (or most likely may not) be read by the justices, but they could influence questions and oral arguments at the hearing.

Most of the amici have been from the usual suspects. Right-wing think tanks are spouting the same tired clichés and intellectually bankrupt arguments. Union advocates question the standing of the plaintiff to even mount a First Amendment claim, argue in favor of respecting long-settled precedent, or—in a new argument—suggest treating agency fees as a kind of tax .

But two briefs stand out, both for what they say and for who is saying it.

One brief, filed by influential right-wing libertarian ideologues Eugene Volokh of UCLA and William Baude of the University of Chicago, actually argues for strengthening the 40-year-old precedent that Janus aims to overturn. The 1978 Abood decision was wrong, they argue, to moot the question of whether workers compelled to pay their fair share for union representation might have a legitimate First Amendment objection to how a union might spend any portion of their fees. That opened the door, Baude and Volokh say, to taxpayers making line-by-line objections to how the government spends its money. “Just as non-union members may find many reasons to disagree with a public union’s speech, there are countless grounds to object to other speech supported by government funds,” they write.

Pointing to government propaganda urging military enlistment and purchase of war bonds, the scholars note that there has never been an option for taxpayers to opt out of funding such practices with which they may disagree, nor even any kind of “equal time” right of rebuttal. A ruling for the plaintiff in Janus could tug at the loose threads of the very notion of a common interest in government.

Another amicus, filed by law professors Charles Fried of Harvard and Robert C. Post of Yale, warns of undermining the precedent set in the 2006 Garcetti v. Ceballos. That decision gave public sector employers “the broad discretion they need to manage their workplaces” by permitting them to compel employees to comply with directives they find politically objectionable. Ruling in favor of Janus, they warn, “would therefore threaten to transform every workplace dispute into a constitutional controversy.”

Fried served as Solicitor General under Ronald Reagan, so his brief likely carries more water with the conservative justices than pro-union arguments for status quo. Furthermore, swing Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority decision in Garcetti, so he would presumably take interest in how the Janus case could blow his work up.

A lot of time and money and energy

One local union in the Midwest is champing at the bit to turn every disagreement they have with the bosses into a constitutional controversy. A January blog post by the Joliet, Ill.-based Operating Engineers Local 150, titled, “Union Busters Set Themselves Up for Janus Backfire,” was widely circulated in #1u social media circles. In it, the union eyes overturning the laws that have made public-sector bargaining illegal in many jurisdictions. It also suggests that workers should be able to opt out of paying for their pension funds’ lobbying expenses and taxpayers opt out of funding municipal lobbyists (the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), for example, receives indirect support from many taxpayer-funded organizations.)

While the gauntlet thrown down by Local 150 was certainly exciting for the few minutes it took to read their fantastical plan to make utter chaos out of a post-Janus world, many readers were left wondering, Are these guys for real?

“We’re going to immediately respond by filing suits to say these laws are unconstitutional,” confirms Local 150 president Jim Sweeney. “Maybe we get screwed again, but we’re going to put corporate powers in a position where they’re forced to explain why workers should only have free speech when it serves them.” So, file that answer under: Hell to the yes.

Local 150 has a track record of pushing the envelope on legal arguments in defense of unions. They’re the union that filed Sweeney vs. Pence, a federal court challenge to Indiana’s “right-to-work” law. Although ultimately unsuccessful, it resulted in a strong dissenting opinion from Chief Judge Diane Wood that forcing unions to spend resources on non-members without compensation is an unconstitutional “taking” under the Fifth Amendment. That has become the legal argument that could overturn “right-to-work” laws around the country, with several cases wending their way through federal circuits at this very moment.

The union has already sent a formal demand letter, chock full of legal citations, to the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund. In it, they complain that their members’ mandatory 4.5 percent retirement contributions are going towards Bank of America lobbying and demand to opt out.

More letters are on the way. Local leaders are hoping to trigger a few rounds of panicked, “WTF?” phone calls to Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner and other Janus cheerleaders.

If enough unions follow Local 150’s lead and make enough hay out of Janus—or even pose a credible threat to do so—don’t be surprised if more conservative jurists rethink their strategy.

[This article originally appeared at In These Times.]

A Republican party that survives through voter suppression may be replicating its model in the workplace. In December, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) invited public commentary on a possible revocation of a rule that makes employers provide union organizers with contact information for workers in advance of a representation election.

Ostensibly, the Board, which will almost certainly remain in control of Republicans until 2021, is reconsidering Obama-era rules that sped up the timeline of union elections and added phone numbers and email addresses to the list of contact info that unions must be furnished before an election. But outgoing Board Chairman Phil Miscimarra’s bellyaching about “employee rights of free choice and privacy” implies openness to removing any legal right of union organizers to talk with potential members.

The very fact that Trump’s NLRB is inviting public comment indicates that it is considering reversing a much older precedent: the 52-year-old Excelsior rule that employers should provide a list of names and addresses of eligible voters in an upcoming union certification election. Sharon Block, a former member of the NLRB and current Executive Director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, has argued that the slew of hastily-decided reversals of second-term Obama precedents “seemed to be a rush to set the clock back on workers’ rights as much as possible.”

The Excelsior rule makes employers provide union organizers with a list of eligible voters and their home addresses a few days before an election. It’s an essential tool in a campaign, and any cut is a blow to unions. However, it is also important to remember that Excelsior was a bad compromise, and a real solution lies in actual free speech in the workplace. That will require that unions wage a free speech fight to regain our voice at work.

Captive-audience meetings versus knocking on doors

As soon as the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935, employers were already challenging the legal framework for workers to organize and bargain collectively.

In six short years, the bosses succeeded in demolishing the Act’s mandate of employer neutrality by strenuously appealing to the Supreme Court that the standard restricts bosses’ First Amendment right to inform their workers about just how strongly they oppose unionization. Six years after that, a Republican Congress codified this unequal application of free speech in the Taft-Hartley Act.

For a brief time after Taft-Hartley, the NLRB enforced an equal time standard by granting union organizers access to talk to workers on the job when an employer conducted captive-audience meetings. In an all-too-familiar pattern, the Board ping-ponged back and forth between different legal standards on employer speech and union access, depending on which political party was in the White House, until 1966.

That was the year of Excelsior Underwear, Inc ., the NLRB decision that established the right for unions to be furnished with a list of names and addresses of eligible voters. It was issued on the same day that the Board declined to reinstate the equal time rule. The case that we should have won that day was General Electric Co. and McCulloch Corp.

Loathe to trample on management’s rights and private property, the Democratic majority begged the unions in that case to try visiting workers at home and see if that effectively counter-balanced the boss’s work-time campaigning.

Anyone who has worked as a union organizer will tell you that an Excelsior list is no match for the mandatory round-the-clock campaigns of intimidation that union-busters consider “management’s most important weapon” in beating back an organizing drive.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of Labor Education Research at Cornell University, has been documenting employer union-busting tactics for decades. Her most recent study, covering the period of 1999 to 2003, found that 9 out of 10 employers use captive-audience meetings to fight a union organizing drive. Bosses threaten to cut wages and benefits in 47 percent of documented cases, and to shut down entirely in 57 percent of union elections. Incredibly, in one out of 10 campaigns employers hired “consultants” to impersonate NLRB agents.

That report is nearly nine years old. It is likely that when Dr. Bronfenbrenner updates her research, all of these numbers will be even higher—particularly the instances of outright lies and deception.

Within the General Electric Co. and McCulloch Corp. decision, the NLRB explicitly invited unions to press the issue of equal time if experience were to prove that knocking on workers’ doors was no match for mandatory captive-audience meetings. Labor law scholars Charles Morris and Paul Secunda were clever enough to notice this half-century-old invitation. Last year, they organized 106 of their leading peers to sign on to a petition to the NLRB to reinstate the equal time rule.

The right to free speech

We shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for Trump’s NLRB to respond to that petition, but we also shouldn’t be patient about demanding change. This past summer, I proposed that unions wage a constitutional battle to challenge the most unequal aspects of labor law and fight for workers’ constitutional rights on the job. Call it Labor’s Bill of Rights.

At the heart of the problem is that the National Labor Relations Act derives its constitutional authority from the Commerce Clause. That means that when workers’ rights are challenged in the courts, judges are weighing corporations’ First Amendment claims against unions’ claims that workers’ rights to organize and go on strike are good for business.

Under that framework, bosses’ rights and business interests have trumped workers’ free speech and human rights. Consider union certification elections. These are official legal elections conducted by an arm of the federal government. At stake is whether the government will enforce certain statutory rights of the workers who wish to form a union. The rules of the election are determined by the government through court decisions, congressional action and NLRB rule-making. In this simple “yes” or “no” vote about whether there shall be a union, only an employer—and only one advocating a “no” vote—can force voters to attend speeches where they will tell them how to vote And if any voter declines to attend, she can be fired. This is compelled political speech and a massive violation of workers’ free speech rights.

Perversely, Trump’s NLRB could be doing us a favor if it really does kill Excelsior lists by making the imbalance of free speech rights in union organizing campaigns that much starker. Regardless of what new form of union busting the Trump NLRB endorses, we should start waging a campaign to restore the equal time rule now.

What this free speech fight would look like as a campaign is this: every time an employer stages a captive-audience meeting in advance of a union election, we should file an Unfair Labor Practice charge. And every time a union loses an election where the employer conducted captive-audience meetings (which, again, is almost always), we should file an appeal to have the election results overturned.

We should be filing these cases now, even with a Trump Board that will dismiss them all. If we can file a couple hundred challenges and make enough noise about them, we can turn the free speech fight over captive-audience meetings into an obvious controversy that the next Democratic-majority NLRB must respond to.

A Democratic NLRB with a modicum of decency would—at a minimum—re-establish the rule that conducting captive-audience meetings while providing union advocates no right of response is grounds to void an election and order a re-run. Better would be a rule making the very act of conducting captive-audience meetings an Unfair Labor Practice subject to court injunctions, unless union advocates are granted an equivalent platform—in work locations, on work time—from which to campaign for a union yes vote.

If the NLRB were to rule in our favor, we should expect the first employer to face sanctions to resist and drag the case into the federal courts. And then we’re off to the races with a well-deserved counter-attack to the cynical right-wing Harris, Friedrichs and Janus efforts to use free speech as a cudgel against union rights.

[This article first appeared at In These Times.]