(The Center Square) – A Pennsylvania-based free market think tank released its latest report grading state public sector labor laws on Tuesday, tracking how government unions have worked to advance pro-union legislation at the state level in the wake of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME.
The 2018 case was brought by Mark Janus, a former Illinois state employee who declined to join AFSCME but was still required to pay the union agency fees. Janus worked as an Illinois child support specialist for 11 years, during which nearly $45 in fees was deducted from his pay each month to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Illinois had granted the union the exclusive right to represent about 35,000 of its public employees, requiring Janus to pay union fees even though he had not joined the union and opposed some of its political positions.
The Supreme Court ruled that public-sector employees who are not union members cannot be forced to pay fair-share fees to a union.
But according to David Osborne, the foundation’s senior director of labor policy and the report’s author, Janus has been shown not to be the death knell for government unions that some thought it would be.
“Today, it is clearer than ever that Janus did not set in motion an irreversible decline in the power and influence of government union executives,” Osborne wrote.
Instead, Osborne said unions responded to the loss of agency-fee revenue by turning their attention to state legislatures.
“Government unions are rebounding after the 2018 Janus decision, which cut off a major — but unconstitutional — funding source for union executives. After the Supreme Court ended this affront to individual liberty, Big Labor turned its focus to a different playbook: state legislatures,” Osborne said in a statement.
The Commonwealth Foundation assigned a letter grade to each state based on 15 criteria. Some criteria were yes-or-no questions like whether the state is a right-to-work state or whether state law permits public sector employees to strike. Others could generate more detailed answers, like “What items may be negotiated in collective bargaining?” and “How are unions certified?”
Thirteen states received A grades, with seven receiving an A+. Those states were Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
Twenty-seven states received a C grade or lower, with 15 earning a D and four receiving a D-. California, Illinois, Maryland, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington received the lowest possible grade of F.
The foundation noted that Florida scored an A by passing some of the country’s most innovative, “pro-worker” reforms, requiring at least 50% turnout for a union to win representation elections – including recertification elections and establishing the right to resign from union membership for most public employees.
Meanwhile, Rhode Island slipped from a D- to an F by expanding collective bargaining to at least four new categories of employees, imposing evergreen contract obligations on police and firefighter agreements and disclosing employees’ personal and demographic information.
It also noted that Utah received a B grade due to its legislative back-and-forth failing to rid the state of collective bargaining.
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