Sean Higgins
The Washington Examiner
7/7/2014
About the best thing that Big Labor can say about the recently concluded Supreme Court term is that it could have been much worse for them.
Union leaders dodged two major bullets in the cases Harris v. Quinn and Unite Here Local 355 v. Mulhall that could have drastically limited union power.
The overall trend remains ominous for Big Labor though. Since John Roberts became chief justice, the court has signaled a willingness to re-think labor law. A major point of emphasis has been the conflict between individual worker rights and union power. Federal law generally assumes that a union’s interests are the same as its workers’ but the court has taken up cases that test that theory…
The article continues at The Washington Examiner.
Related: Union leaders having a hard time talking about Harris v. Quinn
Reactions from Big Labor leaders and the progressive left to the Supreme Court’s Harris v. Quinn ruling Monday were constrained by their inability to directly address the facts in the case.
After all, it’s not easy to make to a convincing argument that labor organizations should have the right to extract money directly from the paychecks of people who don’t want to be union members in the first place, which is ultimately what Harris v. Quinn was about…
