Important Supreme Court Decision For Police Union Issued!

The U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Harris v. Quinn is out. The court has declined to extend its earlier ruling in the 1977 Abood v. Detroit Bd. of Ed. case to allow public sector employee unions to charge an "agency fee" or "fair share" fee to certain "personal assistant" ("PA") employees who are in a state-recognized bargaining unit, but who choose to not join the union. The Court did not overrule Abood, which does allow public sector unions to charge an agency or fair share fee to nonunion members of the bargaining unit, but the Court did call the rationale underlying Abood into question. The very limited specific holding in today's case seemed to turn on the fact that the home health care providers, (Personal Assistants or "PAs") were not traditional public employees, and the union (in this case SEIU) was not functioning as a full-fledged labor union with respect to the PAs. NAPO filed an amicus curiae ("friend of the Court") brief with the Supreme Court in this case, urging the Court not to overrule Abood, and in that regard we were successful. However, the very likely upshot of today's limited ruling will be increased challenges by public employers, including police departments, to agency fees and fair share fees collected by public unions, including police unions and associations. Police unions and associations will need to be prepared to argue persuasively that law enforcement officers are certainly core public employees, much different than the PAs in today's case, and also argue that the police unions and associations themselves effectively provide a far greater scope of services in terms of bargaining, contract enforcement, grievances and arbitrations than did the PAs' union in today's case. (Please note, this doesn't mean that the PAs' union wasn’t a legitimate union, it clearly is. It means that the Court today pointed out that in its view, under the state law where this case arose, the union really didn't have to do much, nor could do much, for the PAs.)

Here is a link to the Court's opinion:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/11-681_j426.pdf

Please feel free to distribute this to your members.  NAPO’s Facebook page has also been updated with a post and link to the Court’s opinion.  Please contact NAPO’s General Counsel, Bill Johnson, if you have any questions about the case.