The wishes of labor supporters in Idaho came true on Friday, with a judge blocking an anti-union bill that would prevent job-targeting programs which "help union contractors submit winning bids on projects" by allowing the unions to put collected dues towards members' wages.
The full ruling is available.
The job-targeting attack is part of the so-called "Fairness in Contracting Law" bill (SB 1007), which also aims to ban Project Labor Agreements and is backed by the staunchly anti-worker Associated Builders and Contractors. Judicial action has not yet been taken on that portion of the law, though labor supporters are hopeful that it too will be struck down.
At the heart of the Idaho court's decision was the interplay between state and federal law:
U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill issued a preliminary injunction on Friday after unions sued, agreeing they had a good chance of succeeding. The unions argued the state law forbidding so-called “job-targeting programs” using union dues was unconstitutional because Idaho sought to pre-empt matters already governed by the federal National Labor Relations Board.
“This creates a risk of conflicting rulings from the state court and the Board, and threatens state interference with the NLRB's enforcement of national labor relations policy,” Winmill wrote in his decision. “This Court has found that there exists a significant risk of overlapping jurisdiction between Idaho state courts and the National Labor Relations Board if the Fairness in Contracting Act becomes effective.”
Winmill's decision was a natural consequence of an overreach by lawmakers intent on hamstringing Idaho unions further, regardless of whether it would withstand court muster, attorney James Piotrowski told The Associated Press.
“Congress designed the NLRB to resolve the legality of job targeting programs, not state legislatures,” said Piotrowski, who represented the Idaho Building and Construction Trades Council AFL-CIO and Southwest Idaho Building and Construction Trades Council AFL-CIO. “There was a broad, anti-federal sentiment in the Legislature this year that was expressed a lot of ways, one of which was in this law, which even the attorney general told them was going to problematic because it conflicted with federal law.”
Read an entire Associated Press story on the matter HERE.