In an op-ed published in the The News Tribune, Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Gov. Jay Inslee show support for the right for unions to collectively bargain:
In what could be one of the most significant workers’ rights cases of our lifetime, the U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to overturn a time-tested standard that protects public employees’ right to collectively bargain for wages and benefits.
In 1977, the high court ruled in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education that while public employees represented by a union could opt out of union membership, they must pay a “fair share” of the cost of negotiation because the union’s work benefitted those employees.
Janus v. AFSCME, which was before the court last week, is a concerted effort by anti-union interests to undo the “fair share” standard and undermine the ability of public sector unions to collectively bargain.
In the decades before Abood, public sector employees around the nation launched enormously disruptive strikes.
Read the rest of his op-ed on The News Tribune.