The Chronicle of Hgher Education
June 30th, 2014
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday dealt a limited blow to public-sector unions when it ruled that thousands of home health-care workers in Illinois cannot be required to pay union fees that help cover the cost of collective bargaining, the Associated Press reported.
The court’s 5-to-4 ruling in the case, Harris v. Quinn, No. 11-681, characterized those workers as “partial-public” employees who could not be forced to pay such fees, which are known as agency fees.
However, the ruling stopped short of overturning a precedent that lets states require “full-fledged” public employees to pay such union fees.
In a written statement on its website, the American Association of University Professors said that the court’s categorization of the workers in question as “partial-public” employees was likely to have “little applicability” to faculty members at public colleges.