Here's today's opinion from Harris v. Quinn, the case that, it was feared, might lead to the end of the union movement. I urge folks to give Kagan's excellent dissent a read, since it provides a good picture of what happened today. But there's a part of the the Majority opinion (written by Alito, which is always a good indicator of a bad ruling) that we need to pay close attention to. In Part II.D., Alito lays out a whole string of flaws he finds with Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the precedent from 1977 that, until today, was controlling on the subject. Here are the phrases that jumped out at me:
The Abood Court's analysis is questionable on several grounds. The Abood Court seriously erred… Surely a First Amendment issue of this importance deserved better treatment. The Abood Court fundamentally misunderstood… Abood failed to appreciate the difference… Abood failed to appreciate the conceptual difficulty… Abood does not seem to have anticipated the magnitude… In the years since Abood, the Court has struggled repeatedly with this issue. Abood likewise did not foresee the practical problems… Finally, a critical pillar of the Abood Court's analysis rests on an unsupported empirical assumption...
All of these statements, taken together, appear to amount to what’s called "stealth overruling." To be clear, today's actual holding in Harris was fairly narrow, and unions definitely lived to fight another day (I wouldn't say they dodged this bullet, but at worst it winged them). But it won't be long before a challenge to Abood comes up, taking aim directly at the idea that workers who don't join unions should still have to pay for services that those unions provide them (such as contract negotiation and enforcement). And today's majority has very strongly signaled to the District and Circuit courts - as well as any potential litigants that business and anti-worker groups want to find - that it's ready to overturn Abood, and to hell with stare decisis. All this is to say that two things are much more important today than they were yesterday: 1. We need to maintain a pro-worker Senate in case of an open SCOTUS seat, and 2. We need to keep a pro-worker President in the White House next term. Make no mistake, this is a fight for the future of the Labor Movement. If unions lose agency fees, then free riders can easily overwhelm the system. Rather than fighting to expand unionization or workers' rights, labor groups will be struggling to merely survive. It's a major threat with very high stakes.