High Court Backs SAG Over Contract Dispute

The Supreme Court, rejecting the pleas of anti-union activists, ruled Tuesday that the Screen Actors Guild can continue to enforce contracts that tell performers “membership in the union” is required.

In truth, workers in union industries need not pay full union dues, thanks to a high court ruling 10 years ago. The justices said then that workers have a right not to pay forced union dues if the money is used for political or lobbying purposes. Unions may, however, collect dues to pay the costs of collective bargaining.

In the decade since that decision, the National Right to Work Foundation has urged the courts to go one step further and throw out the standard union contracts that say a worker must be “a member of the union in good standing.”

These contracts are designed to “mislead” employees and fool them into paying full union dues, the right-to-work lawyers asserted.

They brought the issue to the high court on behalf of a part-time actress from Seattle who was told in 1994 that she must pay a union initiation fee of $500 to the Screen Actors Guild in Los Angeles to get a one-day job on the now-defunct Fox television series “Medicine Ball.” When the actress, Naomi Marquez, balked, SAG refused to clear her for the work and the producer, Lakeside Productions, hired someone else.

Marquez said that she was not told she could pay only the collective bargaining costs. SAG officials said she was informed.

Either way, the difference was trivial. SAG says that 97% of its dues go to costs associated with bargaining. If so, Marquez would have been entitled to only a $15 refund.

But the right-to-work foundation took the case (Marquez vs. Screen Actors Guild, 97-1056) all the way to the Supreme Court, hoping to knock out the standard “membership” clause that is used in union contracts nationwide.

Instead, the court upheld the contracts and said that their enforcement does not violate the union’s “duty of fair representation.”

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that workers must be notified in some way--perhaps in a union newspaper--that they can seek refunds for dues that exceed the costs of bargaining.

But most workers do not read the contract language and they are not fooled about their rights, she said. For that reason, union contracts need not be scrapped and rewritten, she concluded.

An official of the National Right to Work Foundation said that he was taken aback by the decision.

“We are kind of surprised at [O’Connor’s] naivete. These contracts are shoved in the faces of employees, and they are told they must join the union or else,” said Stefan Gleason, the group’s director of legal information. This decision gives “a green light to union deception of workers.”

SAG’s lawyer, Leo Geffner of Burbank, said he was delighted to win unanimously before the high court and suggested that the anti-union advocates had overplayed their hand.

“They took such an extreme position that they lost,” he said. Had the right-to-work foundation prevailed, “thousands of union contracts, maybe tens of thousands of contracts” would have been invalidated and needed renegotiation.

Besides, Geffner said, performers and other union workers are now being told that they have a right to pay lower dues to avoid the small costs for lobbying and politics.

“That’s not new,” Geffner said. “We have been doing that for at least three years.”