Union opponents are seeking to reverse a 1977 Supreme Court decision that allows public employee unions to collect so-called "fair share fees."
Twenty-three states authorize collecting these fees from those who don't join the union but benefit from a contract that covers them.
The decision later this year will have profound consequences not just for the California teachers in Monday's case, but for police, firefighters, health care workers, and other government workers across the country.
To understand what is at stake, here is a primer in how the labor law works in states that have authorized these fees.
If a majority of the public employees at a given site vote to be represented by a union, that union becomes the exclusive bargaining agent for the workers. In California, some 325,000 teachers in more than 1,000 school districts are represented by the California Teachers Assocation and, to a lesser extent, the California Federation of Teachers.
Of those, 9 percent have not joined the union, but under California law, any union contract must cover them too, and so they are required to pay an amount that covers the costs of negotiating the contract and administering it. The idea is that they reap the bread-and-butter benefits covered by the contract — wages, leave policies, grievance procedures, etc. — so they should bear some of the cost of negotiating that contract.
They do not, however, have to pay for the union's lobbying or political activities; they can opt out of that by signing a one-page form.
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