Jefferson County Educators Stand Up For Their Rights
Four educators in Jefferson County are suing the Jefferson County Teachers Association for the right to not participate in or fund the union.
They are being backed in their case by National Right To Work.
From the release:
With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, several Jefferson County educators have filed a federal class-action lawsuit against local and national teacher unions for a series of schemes designed to force unwilling educators into full-dues paying union membership.
The lawsuit alleges that union officials routinely blocked membership resignations for years at a time, automatically enrolled new teachers in the union without their consent, and used a collective bargaining scheme to force county teachers to pay union dues.
SNIP
Currently, teachers employed in Jefferson County are automatically enrolled as union members and forced to pay union dues unless they explicitly register an objection to JCTA union officials. Moreover, teachers are only permitted to resign from formal union membership during a ten day-window period after an individual teacher's contract is signed or after the union hierarchy agrees to a new contract with the local school board. If a teacher fails to register an objection to union membership within either period, he or she is forced to remain a union member until the expiration of the union's five-year contract with the local school board. Many teachers report that JCTA officials never informed them of their right to refrain from joining the union in the first place.
Foundation attorneys believe that any collective bargaining agreement that forces educators to pay union dues to keep their jobs is illegal under state law. Moreover, the Foundation-won Supreme Court precedent Abood v. Detroit Board of Education ensures that teachers and other public employees have the right to resign from union membership. Retaliation or discrimination against employees for deciding against belonging to a union is also illegal.
(Hat Tip: LHL)
