Texans who belong to public sector unions don’t have to, nor must they pay the dues imposed upon them, according to Freedom Foundation. It is spreading the word and it says thousands of people are responding.
Ashley Varner, the Freedom Foundation’s vice president of communications and federal affairs, told Lone Star Standard that in June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its Janus v. AFSCME decision, that public sector employees in non-right to work states have the constitutional right to leave their union and stop paying dues.
“Public employees in right to work states had this ability prior to the Janus decision,” Varner said. “Since the SCOTUS decision, Freedom Foundation has helped more than 70,000 such employees leave their unions — primarily in Washington, Oregon and California where we have offices.”
If people want out of their unions, saving themselves hundreds if not thousands of dollars in due each year, they can go to www.optouttoday.com to gain financial independence from their union. according to Varner.
“In states where we have received a significant number of notices of public sector employees using the website form to notify their unions of their decision to opt out, we create specific pages for that state’s largest public sector unions," Varner said. "We haven’t yet reached that threshold in Texas, because Texas has been a right to work state for many years and, therefore, Texans have had the right to opt out of their union for much longer than the non-right to work states.”
But, she said, they can still use the form to fill out their information and their union’s information and create a populated letter notifying their union representatives of their desire to opt out.
“We get notification of that so we can follow up with the person who filled out the form and make sure their union complied with their request,” Varner said. “If the union doesn’t comply, we take legal action to hold the unions accountable, including cease and desist letters and even litigation. We currently have about 60 legal cases against unions on the West Coast.”
She said the best available data on Texan public sector union membership — which is imprecise — comes from two university professors who run UnionStats.com and compile estimates of union density by state using Census Bureau data and Bureau of Labor Statistics methods. According to their analysis, there were 280,296 union-represented public employees in Texas in 2019.
Texas state law requires that some government employers deduct union dues via payroll deduction from employees’ wages.
“Consequently, we don’t believe Gov. Greg Abbot has the legal authority to simply end government collection of union dues outright,” Varner said. “However, we do believe that Texas political leaders can put in place procedures and protections designed to ensure government agencies only withhold union dues if the employee authorized the deductions in a manner that complies with Janus v. AFSCME. In fact, we recently submitted comments to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on the subject.”
More information on that is available at: https://www.freedomfoundation.com/labor/freedom-foundation-submits-comments-to-texas-ag-about-observing-landmark-janus-ruling/
