WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court will consider letting public-sector employees nationwide refuse to pay union fees, agreeing to take up a major labor-law case that could affect more than 5 million government workers.
The justices said they will consider overturning a 1977 ruling that said those employees can be compelled to pay for union representation for purposes such as pay bargaining as long as they don't have to cover the cost of political or ideological activities.
The court will hear arguments from 10 California teachers who said they have a free-speech right not to support union activities with which they disagree. The court will hear arguments and rule during the nine-month term that starts in October.
The decision to hear the new case "is an important step toward finally respecting the First Amendment rights of America's public servants," Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
The Supreme Court a year ago cast doubt on the 1977 ruling, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. Writing a 5-4 decision, Justice Samuel Alito called the ruling "questionable" while stopping short of overturning it.
Twenty-four states already give workers the right to refuse to pay union fees. The other 26 have more than 5 million public-sector workers, according to Mix's group.
Union leaders said the case threatens to undermine the ability of public-sector workers to push for higher wages and better job conditions.
"The Supreme Court has chosen to take a case that threatens the fundamental promise of America -- that if you work hard and play by the rules you should be able to provide for your family and live a decent life," said a joint statement by leaders of the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and three other unions.
Under California law, public workers in what are known as "agency shop" jobs must either become dues-paying union members or pay a fee to support the union's collective-bargaining activities. Covered activities include lobbying that supports the union's negotiating positions.
For teachers, union dues often exceed $1,000 per person, though people who don't want to pay for political activities can cut that amount by $350 to $400, according to the teachers suing California.
The suing teachers said the system forces them to pay for union speech on important public-policy questions.
"It is difficult to imagine more politically charged issues than how much money cash-strapped local governments should devote to public employees, or what policies public schools should adopt to best educate children," the appeal argued.
The California Teachers Association and California Attorney General Kamala Harris urged the high court to reject the appeal. They argued that collective bargaining doesn't involve the type of political or public-policy issues that trigger First Amendment protections.
"One searches the petition in vain for anything the unions actually seek in collective bargaining to which the petitioners are opposed," the teachers' group argued.
Harris told the court that "mandatory agency fees ensure that all employees in a particular bargaining unit pay a fair share of the cost of the representation."
The appeal also contends that, at a minimum, California can't require objecting workers to opt out every year to avoid paying for the union's political activities.
The case is Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, 14-915.
Also Tuesday, the justices agreed to hear a new case about the drawing of state legislative districts in Arizona by an independent commission, a day after the justices upheld the commission's congressional map-drawing.
The court said it will consider in its new term whether the legislative districts are unconstitutional. Eleven Republican voters had sued the commission, claiming it illegally shifted Republican voters from some districts to make them more likely to elect Democrats to the state Legislature on the premise of complying with the federal Voting Rights Act.
A panel of federal judges found that the state's redistricting commission did not violate the Constitution's equal-protection clause by putting more Republican voters in some districts that already were likely to elect GOP candidates and leaving other districts with smaller overall populations. Those districts have heavier concentrations of Hispanic voters and are considered more likely to elect Democrats.
The judges acknowledged that some commission members were trying to "improve Democratic prospects in the affected districts."
But the judges found that the differences between the districts were legal -- in spite of the constitutional principle of one-person, one-vote -- because the commission mainly was trying to win Justice Department approval under the Voting Rights Act.
Two years ago, the Supreme Court largely ended the Justice Department's role of giving advance approval to districting plans in Arizona and other states with a history of discrimination against black, Hispanic and other minority-group populations. But the Arizona maps were drawn before the 2013 Supreme Court ruling.
Voters created the commission in 2000 to take the job of drawing new maps out of the hands of the Legislature.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that cutting lawmakers out of congressional redistricting does not violate the Constitution's Election Clause, which gives state legislatures the power to set the "times, places and manner" of holding congressional elections.
The case, Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, 14-232
Information for this article was contributed by Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News and by staff members of The Associated Press.
A Section on 07/01/2015