Forgery cases give SCOTUS a chance to enforce Janus

By ASHLEY VARNER Reprinted from REDSTATE.com

Dec. 6, 2022

Four years ago, in its landmark Janus v. AFSCME ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 41-year-old precedent cited by 22 left-leaning states to justify forcing millions of public employees to join and/or fund a labor union against their wishes.

Since then, several hundred thousand government workers have parted company with their union — and kept billions of dues dollars in their own pockets — after deciding the association no longer made sense for themselves and their families.

The question is how many more would have done the same had information about Janus and the freedom to exercise the rights it affirmed not been suppressed by the very unions claiming to have only their best interests at heart.

Literally before the ink on the ruling had dried, union leaders had concocted a laundry list of shady schemes by which to skirt the court’s clear intent in Janus if not ignore it altogether

These included limiting defections to an arbitrary, union-created two-week annual opt-out “window” and conspiring with union operatives in government agencies to block lawful public disclosure requests for employee contact information submitted by organizations threatening to tell workers what the union didn’t want them to know.

Horrified by the prospective loss of billions in dues revenue with which they had lined their own pockets and corrupted elected officials for generations, public-sector union leaders resolved to challenge every single request for freedom — with pre-emptive intimidation in the workplace and, for those who didn’t frighten easily, legal action.

And when those tactics weren’t enough, there was always fraud to fall back on.

In approximately a dozen cases currently being litigated in the west coast states of California, Oregon and Washington, public employees were denied the right to opt out because their unions produced forged documents claiming they are valid union dues authorization agreements.

Two such cases, in fact, were appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court just this month.

In Zielinski v. SEIU 503, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals let stand a lower court ruling that no constitutional issue was raised despite the reality that the state of Oregon’s largest public employee union forged the plaintiff’s signature twice on two separate dues authorizations, concluding that as long as the union says that it has the employee’s permission, the state may rely on the union’s statement and need do nothing to protect the First Amendment rights of public workers.

In the second case, Wright v. SEIU 503, the union forged the employees’ signature electronically. While the court presumed the forgery took place, the 9th Circuit concluded neither the state of Oregon nor the union have any constitutional duty to obtain consent from the employee. Both decisions constitute an unadorned Janus workaround.

The Janus ruling, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, makes unequivocally clear that states cannot force a public employee to pay money to a union unless he or she has provided affirmative consent in the form of a waiver of their First Amendment rights.

The state of Oregon and SEIU 503 have long demonstrated they have no respect for workers’ rights. Now the 9th Circuit has rubber-stamped the state’s decision to let unions take what they want from individual workers — with or without their consent.

More to the point, when the same shady tactics crop up again and again in cases involving essentially the same defendants and the same motives, it can’t simply be written off as a coincidence.

Taken collectively, the forgery cases clearly suggest a coordinated strategy on the part of unions panicked into breaking the law at the prospect of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in dues money when members they’ve spent decades preying on discover the power to decide about workplace representation has always been in their own hands.

The Supreme Court made its intentions in Janus crystal clear. Public employees have an ironclad First Amendment right to keep their job even if they choose to have nothing to do with a union.

And they can opt out on their terms, not those dictated — let alone forged — by union thugs.

Ashley Varner

is the

Freedom Foundations’s vice president for communications and federal affairs.