Posts tagged Washington State Supreme Court
Farmworkers call for changes to improve their lives
April 7, 2025 // If all legislators are genuinely interested in supporting people living and working in Washington state, then these interviews should serve as a gut check. All six of the men interviewed indicated a desire to see a significant change in how their workweeks are measured and compensated. Not from their employers but from lawmakers. Guillermo, 62, perhaps summed up the words of his colleagues best: “I think people would be surprised to know that I’ve dedicated my life to working and trying to do good deeds,” he said. “We come here with the mentality that we want to work 50 plus hours per week.”
IF UNIONS DIDN’T HAVE DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL
October 17, 2023 // By any fair reading of the state’s public disclosure laws, the name, address, birthdate, etc., of every person drawing a salary from the taxpayers should be 100 percent disclosable to anyone who asks for it. And for anyone but the Freedom Foundation, it probably would be. But pretty much every time we file a legal public information request for an employee database, the agency in question caves to pressure from public-sector unions to decline it. They cite a variety of bogus reasons for their action, such as concerns we’ll sell the information to a third party — but the truth is even more terrifying to them. They know we’ll inform their members that, according to the First Amendment, they can’t be forced to join or pay dues to a labor union. The government officials who deny our information requests know they’re breaking the law, but it costs them nothing and forces us to spend months or years waiting for the courts to award us what we were entitled to all along.
WA Supreme Court rules on disclosure of public employees’ work information
August 29, 2023 // The court’s opinion is in response to a litigious dispute between the Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Olympia, and approximately 50 labor unions representing thousands of public employees across the state. The foundation had made formal requests to numerous state agencies requesting the full names of their workers along with dates of birth, job titles, work email addresses, annual salary, work location stations and addresses, full or part-time work status and names and titles of their union bargaining representatives. The foundation said it wanted to contact the employees to inform them about a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which banned mandatory union membership and dues in the public workplace. The foundation, in its lawsuit, also asserted that unions had no standing in the case. Justice Barbara Madsen,