In Hudson for the public sector and Beck for the private sector, the USSC has held on 1st Am. grounds that a person who objects cannot be compelled to support the social, political, and fraternal activities of a union. It’s just that very, very few object. That is partly because unions and often complicit employers make it hard to object and second, the state of the law is such that even though you are compelled to pay for true collective bargaining activities, if you are an objecting “fee payer,” you cannot vote on contract ratifications and contract modifications.

As I’ve said here many times before, there is hardly a union dues scheme in the Country that would pass Constitutional muster; they just don’t keep the kind of records necessary to distinguish “social, political, and fraternal” activities from true collective bargaining; in Blue states they don’t even make a pretense and they hardly try in Red states because they’re usually safe from any challenge even in Red states. Even though compelled membership has been un-Constitutional in the public sector since ’86, about half of Alaska’s State labor agreements still had compelled membership provisions when I took over in ’03. I made them all change to at least facially legal “agency shop” language, but I’ll admit that we had better things to do than peek under their skirts, so nothing changed but the contract language. And in those agreements where we did change to authorize agency fees rather than membership dues for objectors, nobody objected that I ever heard of.

If any Republican governor or AG wanted to really make a public sector union gasp for breath, all s/he would have to do is challenge the constitutionality of their dues under the freedom of speech and association provisions of their state constituion. The private sector unions and the blends like SEIU would move straight to the federal courts where the USDOJ would pile in on their side and play for time until the next election in which they could try to get themselves a Democrat to give them their dues back. But, if you did it early in a four year term, you could get it to your state SC and even through a federal appeal in one term. I had our AFSCME unit racked and stacked for decertification and had their dues cut off back in the early ’90s but we didn’t get it going until the third year of the gubernatorial term. They were able to hold out, with a lot of help from the National, and elect the Democrat, Knowles, in ’94 who immediately gave them a contract restoring their dues and saved them. Sure wouldn’t mind another go at that beginning in a first year.

I think it is a state question whether public employees in that state can bargain. Outside the Postal Service where you have both bad management and bad unions, I don’t think unionized federal employees are that much of an issue except when you have a Congress that tries to buy them with unjustified wage increases. Federal employees have VERY limited bargaining rights compared to most state employees in states that allow public employee bargaining.