On June 27, 2018, the US Supreme Court issued its long expected decision in the case of Janus v. AFSCME, Council 31. By a 5-4 majority, the Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for a union representing public employees (federal, state, or municipal) to require its members to pay anything to their union, even though, in most states, that union still has a duty to represent them. If it seems odd for the Supreme Court to rule that unions, private organizations funded by workers’ dues, should have to provide free services to fellow workers who choose not to pay dues, welcome to the current political landscape. But, first, how does the case affect unions now?

Janus has no effect on unions representing private employees. It deals only with public employee unions, such as police officers, fire fighters, teachers, municipal and state workers.

If you are a union member, you continue being a member. There is no direct effect on you.

The immediate impact is: there is no more required agency service fee. What, you may ask, is an agency service fee?

In certain states with public sector collective bargaining laws, such as Massachusetts (governed by Chapter 150E), when a union is chosen by a group of workers to represent them for collective bargaining purposes, that union is obligated to represent all of the employees in that particular group. The group represented by the union is called a bargaining unit. For example, when the police in, say, Lynn, voted to be represented by the Lynn Police Association, that Association (for our purposes, “Association” and “Union” are the same thing) became the “exclusive collective bargaining representative” of the bargaining unit of all of the police in Lynn. Under Chapter 150E, that Association became legally obligated to represent all of the Lynn police, because they are all part of its bargaining unit.

Under preexisting law, public employees could not be compelled to join a union, even when that union has a duty to represent them. However, in Massachusetts and other states with fully developed labor laws, bargaining unit employees who did not want to join their union could be required to pay their fair, proportionate share of the union’s cost of representing them. As members of the bargaining unit, agency fee payers receive the same wages and contractual benefits as union members. Their grievances had to be processed the same as members’ grievances. This “fair share” payment is an agency service fee.

Generally, the amount of the agency service fee was somewhere around 80-85% of the union dues. Not being union members, employees who paid agency service fees could not run for union office, serve in any union position, or have any say in how their unions were run. They also received considerably fewer services than union members, but more about this below. Suffice it to say that, in Massachusetts, not many workers opted to be agency fee payers and, among public safety unions, they were virtually non-existent.

The Janus decision says members of a bargaining unit who refuse to join their union can no longer be required to pay an agency service fee. In fact, they cannot be required to pay anything. Yet their union, under existing Mass. law, still has a duty to represent them in the areas where the union serves as the exclusive collective bargaining representative. Those areas are contract negotiations and grievance processing.

While the case was supposedly decided on First Amendment (“free speech”) grounds, anyone who thinks it a product of refined legal reasoning and scholarship should consider applying to Trump University. The decision is designed to cripple public sector unions, who provide both funds and foot soldiers for causes which ultra-conservative billionaires like the Koch Brothers oppose. We need only look at the 62-38 trouncing of the charter school referendum in the 2016 Mass. election. Only the human and economic resources of teacher and other unions (both public and private sector) succeeded in countering the tens of millions of dollars the charter school proponents pumped into the campaign. These ultra-rich also don’t particularly enjoy paying taxes so that police officers, fire fighters, teachers, and other public workers can lead decent lives with decent benefits and retire on livable pensions. In short, Janus is only superficially about free speech; what it’s really about is breaking unions.

While quitting your union and letting your co-workers’ dues pay for the cost of negotiating your contract and handling your grievances may be an option for some, there are significant downsides to this approach. In many unions, particularly public safety, union members receive significant benefits outside of the contract which are not provided to non-members. Unions represent their members in civil service, retirement, unemployment, and other areas where non-members receive no services. For police officers, in particular, unions provide legal representation at critical incidents and defend their members in civil and criminal cases arising out of their employment. Union members also receive representation in both departmental (“internal affairs”) and external (state and/or federal) investigations. Since these services are provided outside of the collective bargaining agreement, non-members receive none of them. Teachers in Massachusetts who are wrongly terminated can appeal only through an individual arbitration process. The union will fight to get its members their jobs back; non-members can either represent themselves or mortgage their homes to hire their own counsel.

Besides these specific and practical reasons, public workers, at least in Massachusetts, need only look at the benefits they have gained through collective bargaining. During this past year, we have seen teachers in states without union bargaining rights (West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky) marching on their state capitals to achieve even the most modest wage and benefit improvements. While public employees in Mass. have not gotten rich, they have at least been able, for the most part, to be able to lead decent lives, raise and support their families, and retire with some modicum of financial security.

You can anticipate that anti-union groups will conduct a negative campaign to try and convince you to abandon your union and stop paying dues. Groups like the NRTW (National Right to Work) organization, (an oxymoron if ever there was one) will undoubtedly conduct a campaign. They will likely start with the teachers, but all other public employee unions will come next. Members who want to abandon their union must, in Massachusetts, provide at least 60 days’ notice of cancellation. This will provide you and others from your union an opportunity to educate your colleague. The message is very simple: Your union is only as strong as its members; working together we can make our lives better and have some say in our destiny.

Not too long ago, when you bought a house, you got a 30 year mortgage. You paid the same amount every month and, over time, you gained some equity. If you stayed in the house, eventually you paid it off and not only had a place to live but also something to pass on to your children. Then, about 20 years ago, some Wall Street sharpies got a lot of people to refinance or buy new houses. For the first few years, there were very low monthly payments on artificially low interest rates with no payments of principal. The sharpies made a lot of money creating and selling complex financial instruments with these mortgages. If your house went up in value and you sold it, it was a great deal. But in 2008 and 2009, when you couldn’t sell your house, all of a sudden the principal payments and higher interest rates kicked in and the monthly payments were crushing. A lot of people lost their homes.

This is what Janus is all about. On the surface, getting some of the benefits without paying anything looks great. But, over the long haul, you’re just being taken for a sucker. Let’s not get fooled again.

Imagine this scenario: You have a pretty good job in the private sector. You’ve been working there a while and have been making fairly good money. You have received good reviews and haven’t been disciplined. One day, your boss walks in and says, “You’re fired.” When you ask, “Why?”, your boss says, “No reason.” For the vast majority of employees in the United States today, this scenario – while perhaps unlikely – is perfectly legal.

The dirty little secret of the American workplace is the at-will employment rule, which governs the majority of non-government jobs (and a fair number of public sector jobs as well). According to this rule, an at-will employee can be fired for a good reason, a bad reason or no reason at all.

I can hear the protests from employers: if I fired someone for no reason, they’ll sue me. Yes, maybe. But would they win? Unless there are special circumstances (see discussion below), in many cases, the employer would win. What is your legal claim? What law did your employer violate? There is a very good chance that the termination of your employment didn’t violate any laws at all.

Are there exceptions to the at-will employment rule? Yes. The first and best exception is for union employees. Nearly every union contract contains two provisions that take the at-will employment rule and throw it out with the trash: first, a provision stating that employees may only be discharged for just cause, and second, a grievance-arbitration procedure providing that a neutral third party decides whether the employer had just cause to fire you. Not only do these contractual provisions establish a valuable set of workers’ rights, they also avoid the need to sue your employer. Instead of sending individual employees to sue in court, the collective bargaining agreement provides an in-house mechanism that is (usually) cheaper and quicker than litigation for determining whether your termination was just or unjust.

What about negotiating a better deal on your own? A few select high-powered employees with special skills have the clout to negotiate individual employment contracts, and most of those contracts include just cause protection. But the vast majority of non-union workers don’t have many options to fight arbitrary employer behavior, and most of those choices involve getting a lawyer and going to court – an expensive and time-consuming process in a judicial system that is increasingly unfriendly to the underdogs of society.

In rare cases, the requirement of just cause for termination has been adopted through legislation. If you live in Montana or Puerto Rico, you are in luck – those jurisdictions have laws requiring employers to have just cause for firing an employee. In other states, the courts have constructed various exceptions to the at-will rule in limited situations. There is a public policy exception, which has been adopted by the majority of states, including Massachusetts. According to the public policy exception, an employer cannot fire an employee when the termination would violate a well-defined and explicit public policy. This exception has been applied to cases in which employees were discharged for filing workers’ compensation claims, serving on juries or refusing to commit perjury for the employer. There is the implied contract exception, which all but 12 states have adopted. Under this exception, courts have found that statements made to employees by employers, usually in job handbooks and other writings, may create a promise that the employee will only be fired for good cause. Such documents may also bind the employer to follow certain procedures before firing an employee. The most far-reaching and least common exception is the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing, which has been adopted by Massachusetts and 10 other states. According to this doctrine, an employer must act in good faith in making employment decisions. The implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing prohibits an employer from firing an employee for a bad reason – such as to avoid paying the employee a commission – but does not go so far as to require the employer to have a good reason for firing someone.

But what about all the laws out there protecting workers from unfair treatment, you might ask. Yes, but. Each of these laws has a very specific target and procedure, and courts and government agencies have in some cases created significant hurdles to winning a claim. So, for example, if you are fired in retaliation for blowing the whistle on your employer’s illegal or unsafe actions, you may be protected. If you are fired in retaliation for exercising your rights under some other statute (such as filing a discrimination complaint or trying to organize a union), you may be protected. If you are fired because of your race, sex, ethnicity, religion, age, disability (or perceived disability), sexual orientation, veteran’s status or other specific category, you may be protected. But ask any employment lawyer whether it is easy it is to win a discrimination lawsuit: even in cases where there seems to be blatant bias, complicated legal rules can keep justice out of reach or delay the outcome for years.

So, yes, there are many different ways the law protects workers from unfair treatment, but most of these statutes and common law exceptions to the at-will employment rule do not address the scenario set out at the beginning of this article. Let’s say the boss is telling the truth when he or she says, “I don’t have a reason” and can prove it in court. Unlikely? Perhaps. Even the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing – if you’re lucky enough to be in a state that has adopted it, like Massachusetts – may not be enough to protect you. And what if the boss does have a reason that has nothing to do with any of the protected categories set out above? It doesn’t have to be a good reason, as long as there is no evidence of bad faith. Your performance isn’t up to snuff, or you’ve broken a company rule. You and the boss are having a personality conflict. Or maybe you’re just not on the A Team, not among the boss’s favorites. None of these reasons, on its face, is illegal, at least in most jurisdictions. If you don’t have a union to protect you, you may be out of luck. Unless, of course, you live in Montana.

On December 14, 2017, the National Labor Relations Board reversed the Browning-Ferris joint-employer policy established in 2015, marking the first of many significant policy changes that are expected from the Board over the next few years. Newly minted Board members Marvin Kaplan and William Emmanuel, whose appointments by President Trump gave the Board its first Republican majority since 2007, joined with Chairman Philip Miscimarra in issuing the opinion in Hy-Brand Industrial Contractors, LTD. And Brandt Construction Co. (Case No. 25-CA-163189).

The 2015 Browning-Ferris decision revised the standard by which the Board finds two companies to be “joint-employers” of employees that performed work for both companies. Traditionally, whether or not an “employer-employee” relationship exists turns on how much control an employer has over its workers. Where there are multiple employers directing or controlling the same workers, determining whether an employment relationship exists between the parties becomes more difficult. For example, if McDowell’s, Inc. owns a fast-food restaurant chain but contracts with a local company that controls the day-to-day operations of a particular restaurant, it might not be immediately clear if either company is the direct employer of the people who work there, or if both companies are joint-employers. Therefore, only one of the companies may be required to bargain with a union or employee representative.

Prior to Browning-Ferris, for two companies to be considered joint-employers, each would have to possess and exercise authority in controlling employees’ terms and conditions of employment. In Browning-Ferris, the Board removed the exercise requirement, bringing companies that simply possessed control over terms and conditions of employment to the table to bargain with the union over those terms and conditions, even if they did not exercise that control “directly and immediately.”
Thursday’s ruling in Hy-Brand Industrial Contractors revived the old rule, reinstating the requirements that an employer must both possess and exercise control to be considered a joint-employer, and that the control must be “direct and immediate.” The Board called the Browning-Ferris standard a “distortion of common law” and “ill-advised as a matter of policy.” The Board argued that the definition of a joint-employer was “confused” and that it produced “wide-ranging instability in bargaining relationships.”
In their dissent, Board members Mark Gaston Pearce and Lauren McFerran harshly criticized the reasoning and result of their colleagues’ decision. They first took issue with the “indefensible” process carried out by the Board in arriving at its decision, arguing that the Board disregarded “basic principles of reasoned decisionmaking” and “longstanding Agency norms in favor of public participation.” They called the Board’s “unwillingness to let the parties and the public participate” in the fact-finding process “particularly curious,” referring to the Board’s abandonment of the usual practice of soliciting briefs from the parties and the public prior to overturning a significant policy decision. “It is reasonable to infer,” they wrote, “that our colleagues do not want to engage the public for fear of what they might learn – namely, that none of the predicted effects of [Browning-Ferris] have actually come to pass.”

The dissenting members further opined that the decision demonstrated “a willful misunderstanding of the joint-employer standard,” and that it “violates the explicit policy of the National Labor Relations Act: to ‘encourag[e] the practice and procedure of collective bargaining.’” It is clear that this decision, by design, will lead to fewer parties at the bargaining table.

Chairman Miscimarra’s term expired on Saturday, December 16, leaving the Board ideologically split 2-2. President Trump has not yet nominated a candidate for his replacement.
You can read the Hy-Brand decision here, and the Browning-Ferris decision here.