U.S. Backs Use of Union Dues for Political Purposes

Breaking with its most conservative backers over one of their favorite causes, the Reagan Administration Thursday urged the Supreme Court to permit unions to use their members’ compulsory dues for political purposes.

U.S. Solicitor Gen. Charles Fried, in a brief sent to the Supreme Court, said that federal labor law does not put such restrictions on union spending, a position that set off a furor among right-to-work attorneys.

“He wants to go along with the AFL-CIO and compel people to support political causes with which they disagree,” complained Reed Larson, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which has been fighting the issue in court for more than a decade.

Larson and other conservative lawyers said that they were stunned to learn of the Administration’s position in a key case pending before the high court. In a letter to White House Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker Jr., Larson said that Fried’s stance “could shamefully embarrass” the Administration before its conservative allies. The 1980 Republican Party platform pledged to “end the use of compulsory union dues in politics,” Larson noted.

Justice Department officials familiar with the case said that the Administration’s position is based on the what the law says, not on what they might prefer.

Earlier High Court Rulings

The issue concerns workers who may not agree with their unions but are covered by collective bargaining agreements that require them to pay union dues. In two earlier rulings involving schoolteachers, the Supreme Court has said that unions of public employees may spend compulsory dues money only for the costs of collective bargaining. Money spent for other purposes, such as political action, must be refunded to dissidents, the justices said unanimously in 1985.

Until now, however, the high court has not said whether the same rules apply to unions in the private sector. Last year, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a Baltimore man who contested dues assessed by the Communication Workers of America, applying the same logic as in the public employees cases to say that the union had no right to use his dues money for political causes. A lower court had found that only 21% of the dues money was spent for bargaining purposes and that the rest should be refunded.

Major Victory

The ruling was a major victory for right-to-work lawyers, who said that it called in question collective bargaining agreements covering nearly 40 million workers in private industry.

The union appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that constitutional protections do not cover workers in private industry the way they do in the public sector.

On Thursday, Fried’s office agreed. He urged the justices to reverse the appeals court ruling in the case (Communication Workers of America vs. Beck, 86-637).