Posts tagged membership card
Connecticut: City of Shelton doesn’t have to pay Teamsters’ “initiation fees” after MERA violation
May 10, 2023 // Teamsters Local 145 secretary-treasurer Dennis Novak wrote that he was happy the city hired these four individuals, there was no need to extend the period and alter provisions in the contract and refused to sign the MOU. The full-time offers to the four employees were ultimately rescinded. When the city moved to hire the same four workers to do the same work at the same pay as the full-time job on a contractual basis, they all signed union membership cards to have union dues deducted from their pay, but the city denied their memberships, saying that since the employment offers had been rescinded so should the union membership applications. The Labor Board ordered the city to cease and desist from dealing directly with prospective employees for bargaining unit positions, hire the four employees to the positions offered to them with back pay, and pay the union back dues. Shelton had been at odds with Local 145 in 2022 over contract negotiations that had reached a stalemate.
9th Circuit forgery decisions allow unions to rule by deceit and undermine workers’ rights
October 18, 2022 // This September, the 9th Circuit decided two cases brought by the Freedom Foundation alleging government unions forged public employees’ signatures on membership agreements to continue deducting dues from their pay. Walking a legal tightrope, the three-judge panel managed to acknowledge the membership cards in question were forged while simultaneously concluding a union can’t be held responsible for dues illegally taken from a public employee’s paycheck because a union isn’t a government agency; rather, it is merely a private organization. And conversely, the state is also blameless, the court concluded, because the state is free to delegate to the union all responsibility for deciding who does and doesn’t pay dues. In other words, the 9th Circuit claimed the state has no duty to protect its employees’ First Amendment rights. Got all that? The union forged a worker’s name on a membership form, and the state blindly accepted it as genuine. But neither is at fault, and the worker is simply out of luck, according to the 9th Circuit.
Should Union-Backed Fraud Be Legal?
October 11, 2022 // Last week, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued rulings in cases brought by the Freedom Foundation alleging that government unions forged public employees’ signatures on membership agreements in order to continue deducting dues from their pay. Perhaps the most egregious of the decisions is found in Zielinski v. SEIU 503, in which SEIU forged Mr. Zielinski’s signature twice on two separate dues authorizations. These decisions essentially authorize government-employee unions to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME by engaging in state-sanctioned fraud.