Rebecca Friedrichs in Washington for oral arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case before the Supreme Court last week. She is fighting a requirement that she pay what are called “fair share” fees to the teachers group.

Rebecca Friedrichs is a longtime public school teacher in California who would never have predicted she would be at the center of a pivotal U.S. Supreme Court case.

But she decided to fight a requirement in California law that she pay what are called "fair share" fees to the California Teachers Association. The third-grade teacher is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by several teachers that could have a significant impact on public employee unions and First Amendment protections. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last Monday. A ruling is expected this summer.


Friedrichs, by choice, is not a member of the union. But she is required to pay fees to the union because she is covered under the teachers contract negotiated by the union. The fees are supposed to compensate the union for its costs associated with collective bargaining.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1977 that workers could not be compelled to pay for a union's direct political activities, but could be required to contribute to the costs of collective bargaining.

Friedrichs argues that law requiring her to pay for collective bargaining nonetheless violates her First Amendment rights of free speech and free association.

Union supporters argue that mandatory fair share fees are justified because the employees who pay them gain the benefits of collectively bargained contracts. Remove the fee requirement, they say, and the employees reap benefits while leaving others to pay the cost of gaining those benefits.

"The unions call me a free rider," Friedrichs said during a recent visit with the Tribune Editorial Board. "But the benefits they negotiate for me are not worth the moral costs. The defined benefit program and the expense to my community and my nation, and using my money to protect teachers who are ineffective and sometimes abusive in class — this is a liberty issue for me."

There's a persuasive argument at the heart of this case that contract bargaining by public sector unions amounts to political activity that has a profound impact on public policy.

When a public sector union negotiates higher wages and benefits, that requires more money from taxpayers or less spending on other government services. Teachers unions negotiate on such hotly debated public issues as tenure and merit pay. Some teachers disagree with the union position on those issues. As Justice Anthony Kennedy said in oral arguments on Monday, "the union basically is making those teachers compelled riders for issues on which they strongly disagree."

Consider the current negotiations between the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Public Schools. The CTU announced early in the negotiations that its demands included a freeze on charter school expansion, a reduction in standardized testing and a shift of tax increment financing money to education. All are intensely debated political issues.

So is the issue of whether teachers union contracts protect unqualified or incompetent teachers from being removed from the classroom.

Friedrichs said she learned an early lesson about this issue and the potency of teacher unions. When she was a 22-year-old college student, she worked with a teacher who was abusive to students, yelling at them and yanking them around. The students were in first grade.

Horrified, Friedrichs asked her teacher-trainer why the teacher had not been disciplined or fired. Her trainer explained teacher tenure, the grievance process and the mission of the union to protect its members.

"That doesn't help the children," Friedrichs said. "You can't redo first grade."

Even now, in her 28th year of teaching, Friedrichs said she cannot recall any teacher in her district getting fired for bad behavior or ineffectiveness in the classroom.

Early in her career, Friedrichs was a full dues-paying union member who tried to effect change from the inside. When she declined to participate in election activity — making calls on a phone bank to defeat a school choice initiative — she was shunned, she said, by her colleagues. Eventually she dropped her union membership, but still had to pay the fair share fees.


This case is being watched intently in Illinois and the rest of the country. Shortly after he took office, Gov. Bruce Rauner issued an executive order to stop the collection of fair share fees from Illinois state workers, but he was blocked by the courts.

In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in an Illinois case that home caregivers could not be compelled to join a union, concluding that "except in perhaps the rarest of circumstances, no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support."

Based on that decision, and last Monday's oral arguments, many people expect that Friedrichs and her fellow plaintiffs will win their case before the Supreme Court.

If they do, public employee unions could see an erosion of membership — but that's not a given. They would have to make a compelling case to workers that union membership was worth the benefit reaped in collective bargaining.

The point is, workers would have the freedom to make that decision. The freedom to decide with whom they will associate, and the freedom to decide how they will influence some of the most critical public decisions a community makes.

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