Pennsylvania unions vow to do job, despite loss in court

*This story has been updated*

(Harrisburg) — Pennsylvania labor unions vowed to keep doing their job representing workers after Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that government workers can no longer be required to contribute to labor unions that represent them in collective bargaining.

The decision could deal a serious financial blow to organized labor, but Pennsylvania unions say they were prepared and do not expect a dramatic impact on their resources.

What could follow, however, is an anti-union campaign to persuade members to stop paying dues altogether. Until now, represented public-sector employees who did not want to join the union or pay dues made a smaller payment under a 1988 state law, called a fair-share fee.

More than 300,000 public-sector workers in Pennsylvania are represented by labor unions, including teachers, police, firefighters, social services workers, prison guards and rank-and-file government agency employees.

Republicans and business associations applauded the court’s decision, while Democrats and labor unions criticized it.

Rick Bloomingdale, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, said the lawsuit was driven by corporate billionaires trying to undermine the labor movement. Gene Barr, CEO of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, said the decision forces public-sector unions to recruit and retain members, like every other membership association engaged in lobbying or politics.

PREPARING FOR IT

The decision could encourage union members to stop paying dues for services — such as contract negotiating, providing information about benefits or legal representation in grievances or arbitration — that the ruling now means they can get for free.

Labor union officials say that, for the past year or so, they have made a practice of approaching rank-and-file members to ask them to continue paying dues if the court ruled against unions.

Part of that exercise involved asking non-members making a fair-share payment to start paying dues.

The state government, school districts, counties, municipalities and other public agencies must change payroll systems to stop automatic deductions of fair-share fees from employee paychecks.

For the state government, that change will be effective starting Wednesday.

FINANCIAL HIT

Union officials say they will suffer a financial hit, a loss that will vary by union.

Les Neri, president of the nearly 40,000-member Pennsylvania State Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, said the vast majority of his covered employees pay dues, and perhaps less than 1 percent pay fair-share fees.

Service Employees International Union Local 668, which represents about 20,000 social-services agency workers, has more than 80 percent of its covered employees pay dues, president Steve Catanese said.

The state’s largest public-sector union, the Pennsylvania State Education Association, has about 181,000 dues-paying members in school districts across the state, and about 6,500 non-members — or less than 4 percent — paying fair-share fees. The court’s decision could translate to a loss of $2 million out of about $80 million in annual dues and fair-share fees, PSEA spokesman David Broderic said.

CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS

The loss of fair-share fees will not affect organized labor’s campaign contributions, which is funded by a separate pot of money from voluntary donations, union officials say.

Unions are among the biggest donors to Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s re-election campaign, giving more than $8 million going back to last year.

In a statement Wednesday, Wolf called the court’s decision “a major step backward for working families and the middle class.”

Republican nominee Scott Wagner had supported legislation that would have accomplished the same goal as the court’s decision. He called it “a huge step forward empowering workers and putting more money in the paychecks of public employees, for them to do what they want with it, not what union bosses want.”

FIGHTING BACK

Bloomingdale warned that unions will grow stronger from this.

“The labor movement’s been attacked since it began, whether with guns, knives, bats, ax handles or courts,” Bloomingdale said. “The labor movement has survived all those attacks, and it’ll survive this.”

David Fillman, the executive director of the 65,000-member Harrisburg-based Council 13 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said he expects anti-union foundations with the same donors as those who backed the lawsuit to take the next step of training people to knock on the doors of union members to try to persuade them to drop their union membership completely.

“They want to go further beyond the court decision,” Fillman said. “They’re going to go after the rest.”