The plaintiffs in the first two cases, Troesch v. Chicago Teachers Union and Fischer v. Murphy in New Jersey, said that so-called “escape periods” — short windows of time in which employees can opt out of paying union dues — are allowing states to avoid compliance with the court’s 2018 decision in . 

In Janus, the court ruled that the fees violate non-union members’ First Amendment rights because that money subsidizes political and policy positions.

The court on Monday also denied a request to hear a case from a Chicago teacher, , who argues he should receive a refund for the union fees he paid. Ocol has the picket line in the past two Chicago teacher strikes in 2016 and 2019.

A Supreme Court ruling on the post-Janus lawsuits would have impacted nearly 5 million members of public sector unions, according to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which has been fighting what it calls “schemes” to get around the 2018 ruling. For example, 17 states limit withdrawal from the union to official escape periods, which can range from 10 to 30 days. If educators miss that opt-out window, school districts continue withdrawing the union dues from their paychecks for another year. Some of the laws were passed shortly after the Janus decision. But the Foundation and its clients haven’t been successful, and the appellate courts for the 3rd, 7th, 9th and 10th circuits have upheld restrictions on when employees can opt out of paying fees.

“We are disappointed the Supreme Court did not take this opportunity to clarify this important issue,” Patrick Semmens, the Foundation’s vice president, said in a statement. “We believe the Janus ruling does not permit public sector employees’ constitutional rights to be limited to an arbitrary union-created ‘escape period,’ and that eventually the High Court will need to step in to prevent Janus from being undermined.”

The Foundation continues toĚýpress that point. In late October, the Foundation asked the court to hear several that don’t involve teachers. The anti-union attorneys argue some new employees are never informed about their right to refuse to pay dues under the Janus decision.

According to Colin Sharkey, executive director of the non-union Association of American Educators, thousands of teachers contact the organization each year for help on how to exit their union.

“Numerous states made it even harder to leave the union in the aftermath of the Janus decision, greatly limiting the will of many public employees,” he said.

But unions, which have seen declines in membership, maintain that they negotiate on behalf of all employees, whether or not they want to be part of a union. 

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the court’s denial “exposed these frivolous cases for what they are: a cynical attempt by well-funded, anti-union radicals to flood the zone with countless post-Janus lawsuits to drain unions of resources.”

The Janus decision “fundamentally undermines public service workers’ ability to collectively bargain. Congress has both the power and responsibility to protect the organizing and collective bargaining rights of all workers, no matter where they live or work,” said Rep. Frederica Wilson, Democrat of Florida and the chair of the Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions subcommittee.

Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, called the legislation “another Democrat attempt to put the thumb on the scale in favor of forced unionization.”

The debate focused on two bills. The , introduced Wednesday, would permit state and local workers to bargain collectively over wages, hours and other conditions. The other, the , would apply those rights specifically to “public safety officials” like firefighters, police and EMTs.

Eight states do not permit collective bargaining by any public employees, and another 12 limit it to only certain professions, said Joseph Slater, a professor at the University of Toledo, who supports the bills.

Permitting public-sector workers to bargain also cuts down on disruptive labor strikes, like the teacher walkouts last year, which largely occur in states where public-sector workers have fewer rights, Slater said.

“Tłóąđ reason [for those strikes] is the workers feel, often justifiably, that they have no other options to get their employer to listen to their concerns, to really take them under consideration,” he added.

Republicans on the committee and some witnesses, meanwhile, challenged the bills as a violation of federalism.

“Congress has no business centralizing all of this power in the federal labor relations authority. It would be an enormous federal overreach and a violation of the principle of federalism to do so,” said Missouri state Sen. Robert Onder, a Republican. (He was the author of a bill that put new conditions on public-sector workers’ unionization and collective bargaining; .)

But another principle of federalism is that Congress can step in to address problems when doing so is in the national interest, said Rep. Donna Shalala, Democrat of Florida.

There are plenty of examples of Congress setting national minimum standards in employment law, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Equal Pay Act, and the Pregnancy Nondiscrimination Act, said Teague Paterson, deputy general counsel at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which unsuccessfully defended mandatory union dues in the Janus case.

Democrats also said the lack of collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers in some states violates international norms.

“It is a fundamental human right. The idea that we’re having this hearing, and having people in the minority talk about how great it is that we’re denying a fundamental human right to American workers, is not something that would happen in virtually any other country in the world. It’s a shame on our country that we’re even having this discussion,” said Rep. Andy Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Republicans, for their part, said the United States shouldn’t be compared to other countries. The issue isn’t barring people from joining unions but rather giving them the freedom to choose, Walberg said.

“We’re not against that. We’re saying there ought to be choice, that free citizens in a free country, unique and separate from any other nation in the world [should decide],” he said.

In June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public-sector unions could no longer charge representation fees to nonmembers. The decision in Janus v. AFSCME was expected to have an immediate explosive effect. Unions had argued before the court that the loss of fees would be devastating, and in her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan warned that the majority’s ruling “wreaks havoc on entrenched legislative and contractual arrangements.”

Much of , with headlines such as “” and “.”

It’s now a year later, and the apocalyptic predictions have not come to pass, leading the press to swing uncontrollably in the opposite direction, with headlines such as “” and “.”

The immediate effect of the Janus decision was to free fee-payers. Those who were previously compelled to pay upwards of 70 percent of full dues now paid nothing. Nor did they have to do anything at all to achieve this new status. To comply with the ruling, school districts stopped extracting the fees from teachers’ paychecks.

Members, on the other hand, first had to become nonmembers, which meant resigning from the union. Unions established windows and spelled out procedures for doing so. Some are onerous, others not so much, but all of them are more difficult than the procedure for joining.

The membership figures from the California Teachers Association support what a level-headed pre-Janus forecast would have told us.

According to internal documents, on Dec. 31, 2017, the union had 325,812 members and 28,459 fee-payers working in California’s public schools and universities.

On Dec. 31, 2018, there were 328,913 members — an increase of 3,101, or just under 1 percent. But the fee-payers were gone.

The union has had comparable membership increases every year since 2011-12. The lack of effect on membership, coupled with the sizable loss of fee-payers, suggest nothing about the relative merits of the Janus case or the ideological composition of California’s teaching corps. Instead, they confirm human nature for us.

Most teachers did nothing.

For a member, doing nothing resulted in remaining in the union. For a fee-payer, doing nothing resulted in becoming a non-paying nonmember.

Will such inaction continue? Yes, to an extent. Current members are unlikely to resign in any great numbers. Over time, however, they will retire. The burden will be on the unions to recruit new members in the same percentages as they enjoyed pre-Janus. The lesson of the Michigan Education Association is instructive.

Representation fees were eliminated in Michigan in March 2013. That October, the union’s president, Steven Cook, went on television to . “We lost 1 percent,” he said.

In subsequent years, he continued to downplay the effects of the state law. But eventually, he stopped. With representation fees in place in 2012, his union had 117,265 members working in the state’s public schools. By the end of August 2018, it had 84,872 — a loss of almost 28 percent.

We can expect that some state unions will see similar declines, others not as much. The key takeaway is that the loss of representation fees is indisputably a net negative for teachers unions, but not cataclysmic. A union operating at three-quarters of its former capacity can still be formidable, both at the statehouse and the bargaining table.

That knowledge gap, despite widespread media coverage and active union campaigns, may explain why a long-predicted drop in union membership post-Janus hasn’t materialized, one advocate said.

“Why haven’t more teachers opted out of the union? The survey shows they don’t know that they can,” Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators, a non-union teachers’ association , said on a call with reporters Monday. AAE’s foundation sponsors the Teacher Freedom Project, which commissioned the poll.

Media representatives for the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the two largest teachers unions, did not respond to a request for comment. Union leaders have said they redoubled their efforts to recruit and retain members ahead of the Janus decision, and that teachers are seeing the value of membership.

YouGov conducted the online survey of 1,000 teachers between May 29 and June 9.

More than three-quarters of the 1,000 teachers hadn’t heard of the case Janus v. AFSCME, and slightly more than half, 52 percent, didn’t know that the ruling ended mandatory union dues for public-sector workers.

The survey also found that less than a quarter of respondents had re-evaluated their union membership in the wake of the decision, handed down a year ago on Thursday.

Of the 22 percent of respondents overall who had re-evaluated their membership, 16 percent stayed in the union, 5 percent said it made them more likely to leave the union, and 1 percent said they left.

The level of knowledge about Janus wasn’t dramatically different between so-called Janus states, like New York, California and Illinois, where state law mandated that dissenting members continue paying part of their dues, and non-Janus states, where state law already permitted dissenting members to opt out, Sharkey said.

In California, where state unions worked on the issue extensively, 27 percent of teachers knew the Janus decision by name, Sharkey added — just 5 percent more than the national average.

Many teachers don’t know about the decision because little information has reached members, and they’re focused on other things, two Minnesota teachers, both of whom have opted out of union membership, said on the press call.

“Most teachers, they want to focus on teaching. They want to focus on their students … That’s the key part of it, but I think some of those things on membership and opt-out period need to be adjusted,” Daniel Elo, an elementary STEM teacher, said on the call.

Mistaken beliefs about union benefits, and limitations on when dissenting members may withdraw, may also be factors in why more teachers aren’t leaving unions, Sharkey said. Those limitations are being challenged across the country.

Some teachers responding to the poll also incorrectly believed that they would lose various benefits if they left the union, including seniority status (12 percent), health insurance (18 percent), tenure protections (23 percent), pay increases negotiated by the union (25 percent) and other terms of the union-negotiated contract (32 percent).

Mark Janus, the former Illinois state worker celebrating the one-year anniversary of his successful case to end mandatory union dues for public employees, isn’t done with his legal battle just yet.

Dozens of lawsuits seeking to further expand dissenting public employees’ rights are pending across the country. They’re grouped around a few main issues, including “clawback” cases that seek the return of dues paid from before the time the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. Of those, Janus’s is among the farthest through the legal process, experts said at a panel discussion celebrating the one-year anniversary of the high court’s ruling. It was sponsored by the Liberty Justice Center and Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which have advocated against mandatory union dues.

They’re class action suits, brought on behalf of everyone who was required to pay mandatory “fair share” fees even though they disagreed with the union’s positions and didn’t want to be members.

“Tłóąđ amount of money at issue is considerable,” said William Messenger, a staff attorney with the National Right to Work Foundation. It shows the degree to which unions were violating employees’ rights, he added.

For their part, unions have relied on a “good faith” argument that they had no reason to believe their conduct was unconstitutional. Representatives for the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

Statutes of limitations constrain the time period in which these types of class action suits can be brought, usually to somewhere between one and three years, depending on the state, so these cases aren’t likely to linger in the courts, Messenger said.

There is likely more staying power in a different class of lawsuits that challenge limitations on when public employees can withdraw their union memberships.

Those “escape windows,” as Messenger called them, are different around the country — set by state law, collective bargaining or union rules — and likely will continue to face challenges. Messenger predicted the issue will probably end up before the Supreme Court.

Advocacy groups that have launched publicity campaigns to inform dissenting employees of their new rights after the Janus decision have identified some trends among workers trying to leave their unions, said Andy Bookless, a communications consultant on one of those campaigns.

About 1 in 5 are people who, like Janus, disagree with the union’s broader policies and political opinions. A larger group are motivated by finances; lower-paid, early-career teachers living in high-cost cities are particularly prevalent in this group, Bookless said. Still others are apolitical and want to stay out of the issue entirely. And a sizable group, perhaps the largest, cite bad experiences with local union management, he said.

Teachers unions in particular have said members are sticking with them and have decried what they say are inappropriately intrusive efforts to discourage membership. Impact on the unions’ membership figures has been mixed, but they have staged a series of successful strikes across the country and hold considerable clout in 2020 Democratic politics.

One of the people working on that information campaign is Janus himself. He planned to return to his job in state government after the case, but “I saw that I needed to get out and spread the word because the unions are not providing the information,” he said at an earlier panel.

He now works for the Liberty Justice Center, the conservative advocacy group that helped bring his lawsuit.

“My job is just to go out and let these people know that they do have a choice and they can make a decision on their own,” he said.

That case,Ěý, is one of several dozen pending lawsuits that seek to further refine the relationship between public-sector employees, unions, and governments since the Supreme CourtĚý. The latest and most impactful of those rulings, Janus v. AFSCME, which ended mandatory dues payments by public-sector employees, wasĚýargued a year ago last week.

The cases pending before courts around the country fall into a few general categories. “Clawback” cases like the one in Illinois seek the refund of past union dues. Others seek to end time limits on when objecting employees can withdraw from unions, or to challenge unions’ right to exclusively negotiate with employers on workers’ behalf.

Those lawsuits, experts said, could amplify the impact Janus has on union membership rolls and coffers. Though some union officials had planned for a substantial hit in the wake of the high court’s ruling, that isn’t evidenced so far in unions’ public disclosures.

The overall rate of public-sector union membership fell about half a percentage point from 2017 to 2018, but the rate for local government employees, like teachers, actually grew, according toĚý.

Among states that had previously required dues payments from public employees — where Janus should have had the biggest impact — the figures are mixed. The rate of union membership, including both the public and private sectors, dropped in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York, but it rose in Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Washington.

The American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union, added 88,500 members between November 2017 and November 2018, “more than offsetting” the 84,600 members the union “lost with the stroke of a pen” after the Janus decision, Andrew Crook, AFT’s assistant director for media affairs, said in an email.

The group has also won 11 elections to establish a union in a workplace since Janus, tripled its membership budget since 2014, and “nearly doubled” the number of voters contacted in the 2018 elections, he added.

AFT President Randi Weingarten told Senate Democrats last summer that members were sticking with a union, and members’ level of union advocacy in anticipation of the decision was unprecedented in her two-decade career.

The National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, did not respond to a request for comment.

Experts offered various reasons for the so-far limited decline in union membership, including the short window between the Janus decision and data reporting to the federal government, and, despite , a general lack of knowledge about the ruling.

“Considering that the decision was barely a half-year old at that point [when data was submitted], I think that it’s probably fair to say that the worst is yet to come. And that’s just assuming that the Janus decision is limited to what unions hope it’s limited to,” Joseph Slater, a law professor at the University of Toledo, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Meaning, according to Slater, that those pending lawsuits could further reduce membership rolls and union coffers.

The Riffey case, which is supported by the National Right to Work Foundation, seeks the return of $32 million in past dues from the state’s Service Employees International Union chapter.

The particular issue in the Riffey case is whether all home health aides in the state should be deemed members of the same class; lower courts have ruled they are not. In general, unions fighting these clawback lawsuits have said they were relying on Supreme Court precedent at the time that allowed the collection of mandatory dues.

The union “followed the then-applicable laws, because prior to Janus, collection and use of compelled agency fees was lawful,” an . A federal court threw out that Washington case, which also sought repayment of past dues.

William Messenger, a staff attorney with the National Right to Work Foundation, who argued ´ł˛š˛ÔłÜ˛őĚýand is the lead attorney on Riffey, disputed that such a defense is viable.

“Tłóąđre’s no such thing as a good faith defense to First Amendment violations. The defense doesn’t exist,” he said.

At a minimum, he added, unions should have been on notice for the past several years, when the Supreme Court made smaller changes to union laws in the pre-Janus cases in 2012 and 2014.

“Tłóąđ idea that they were innocent in this situation just doesn’t hold water,” Messenger said.

Requiring unions to repay decades’ worth of dues would be a “doomsday scenario” for unions financially, Slater, the University of Toledo professor, said.

As it is, they’re already spending more to fight this wave of lawsuits at the same time they are grappling with lower dues revenue, he noted.

Other lawsuits are seeking to overturn limits on the time in which dissenting members may withdraw their union membership.

And still other lawsuits are challenging exclusive representation, the idea that only one union can represent workers before their employer.

In a case pending before a Massachusetts state court, several educators at the college and K-12 levels are challenging a law that forbids non-union members from voting on contracts or otherwise participating in union decisions.

Forcing teachers to join the union to have a say in workplace policies amounts to illegal coercion, Bruce Cameron, an attorney for the dissenting teachers, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

“Tłóąđ real evil, from our point of view, is our clients being whack-jacked into supporting union politics in exchange for having a voice in what I think most employees would consider to be one of the most important aspects of their life,” he said.

This system of involuntary payments to support lobbying that she mostly disagrees with was supposed to end with the Supreme Court’s ruling this past June in , which bars union shops from mandating membership and dues payments. Mandatory union membership, said SCOTUS, is a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment right to free speech. But this system didn’t end in New Jersey, because legislators, with a heavy assist from NJEA sycophant Gov. Phil Murphy, preemptively circumvented the Janus ruling through a law called the . Now, Fischer and her colleague Jeanette Speck have filed a against Murphy, NJEA, and the Township of Ocean Education Association.

Fischer told me, “I grew up in Italy. There, we call this ‘extortion.’ Pay if you join, pay if you don’t join. There’s no choice.”

This conflict is bigger than a lawsuit filed by two teachers, and the law has nothing to do with enhancing “workplace democracy.” On the contrary, it’s about the political cudgel NJEA wields over Murphy, as well as a fairly large contingent of state legislators. (The just named NJEA president Marie Blistan the 13th most powerful person in the state.) Politics, after all, is an enterprise that seeks power, not righteousness. How this case is resolved will tell us a lot about whether an organization accustomed to controlling the Legislature in particularly child-unfriendly ways can be tamed.

Or even compelled to abide by the U.S. Constitution.

According to the lawsuit, Fischer and Speck are suing because:

“Tłóąđ State of New Jersey is defying Janus by maintaining and enforcing a law that compels public employees who previously signed dues deduction authorizations to pay union dues as a condition of their employment unless and until the employee provides written notice of revocation during an annual ten (10) day window period. In other words, New Jersey law prohibits many employees from exercising their First Amendment rights under Janus for 355-56 days of the year.”

Case in point: Fischer and Speck tried to resign from NJEA in early July, right after the June 27 Janus ruling, but they couldn’t because NJEA said the 10-day window created by the new law doesn’t start until September, when they both (in different years) were first hired. In September, they both again attempted to revoke their membership. NJEA said they had to wait, according to the lawsuit, until the “30th day after the anniversary date of employment.”

Seriously? A union with and in annual dues (2017), in which last year of the president, vice president, and secretary-treasurer were $1.44 million, plus another $1.2 million in deferred compensation, is nickel-and-diming two veteran teachers who have been forced to contribute to a cause they’ve rejected for 30-odd years?

Fischer and Speck are asking that the court issue a “declaratory judgment that New Jersey’s revocation law is unconstitutional under the First Amendment,” that the court rule that NJEA violated their constitutional rights by forcing them to pay dues post-Janus, and that the defendants pay them back the dues that have been collected post-Janus, plus pay their attorneys’ fees. (The teachers are represented by the same law group that represented Mark Janus, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.)

The law itself is shaky on a number of grounds. Murphy, in his May 18 , noted that Bill 3686 may “conflict in some manner with the legal parameters anticipated to be set forth” in Janus, and “I will work closely with the sponsors to enact any required changes,” with particular attention paid to “the privacy concerns of our public employees.” The has multiple concerns: “A3686, in its current form, constitutes an overreach into matters that have traditionally been addressed through the collective negotiations process”; the bill “does not include sufficient assurances that district operations will not be adversely impacted by union activity on school property”; and the bill “violates employee privacy rights.”

I’m not a lawyer. I am a lifelong Democrat, as well as the daughter of two members of the United Federation of Teachers (the New York City arm of the American Federation of Teachers), and it troubles me that Murphy appears in thrall to rich lobbyists. Sure, he’s relatively new at this, and sure, this is the way the world works. But the new state law, which is all about protecting union coffers, reveals NJEA’s and the governor’s coordinated scripts in other educational areas that are unfurling in particularly child-unfriendly ways.

Consider that the governor institute a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools, despite waiting lists of 35,000 students and for more seats. (Indeed, no charters were approved in the most recent round, and the state Department of Education its own process of authorization.)

Consider the way NJEA pressure and legislature cowardice have turned a widely heralded into a nothing-burger. (Last year, were rated effective or highly effective.)

Consider the way Murphy and his political appointee Education Commissioner Lamont Repollet are kowtowing to that they radically reduce standardized tests (“I’ll eliminate PARCC Day One,” Murphy promised NJEA members) and undermine accountability. This politically calculated sop will primarily hurt low-income families, mostly of color, whose children, once again, won’t count because their academic growth won’t be carefully monitored.

Consider the $5 million in union dues NJEA spent (unsuccessfully) to , a union man himself and one of New Jersey’s most educationally literate legislators, because he publicly acknowledges that the teacher pension system is broken.

It’s one thing to parcel out political favors to supporters. It’s another thing entirely when those political favors harm New Jersey teachers and the children they educate, especially those with the odds stacked against them.

Fischer told me, “I’m proud to be an American. This is so un-American.”

Laura Waters writes about education policy and politics at NJ Left Behind, New York School Talk, Education Post, and other publications. She just finished serving 12 years on her local school board in Lawrence, New Jersey, and was president for nine of those years.

In practice, everyone will probably be disappointed, because the most likely outcome is somewhat paradoxical: teachers unions that are smaller but more strident than they are today. The Supreme Court could have issued a narrower ruling giving Mark Janus some relief while preserving some features of the agency fee arrangement. Instead, a five-justice majority upended the public-sector unions’ economic model.

Still, those who see the ruling as something close to a death knell ignore the enormous power teachers unions retain. Collective bargaining agreements and other union-friendly norms remain in place. Even post-Janus, they still have a lot of money to deploy and a lot of leverage in low-turnout school board elections and gerrymandered legislative races where the action is in the primaries. And, as union leaders like to say, management gets the union it deserves. Few observers would give education administration high marks for effectiveness, and education policy these days is an incoherent goat rodeo. So teachers don’t have to work in schools very long before many decide it would be good to have someone looking out for them.

Meanwhile, those who see moderation at hand are ignoring history and how organizations work. The Supreme Court paved the way for those not on board with the unions’ agenda, those who were paying agency fees, to go their own way. But the disengaged and those who just want hundreds of extra dollars in their paychecks aren’t going to stick around either. The political and economic math of being an agency fee payer has changed more than many observers realize. The question is no longer taking on a big hassle, sometimes paying a political price, and inviting the disapproval of many of your peers to get a fraction of your union dues back under the agency fee arrangement. Now, in the wake of Janus, you can keep all your money for far less trouble. That’s a different deal.

Happening simultaneously are two additional pressures on teachers unions. First, the emergence of new groups representing educators around the country gives teachers, especially those who favor reform, better ways than just the traditional union to have their voice heard. Some of these groups specifically work to give experienced teachers a voice in education policymaking. Second, anti-labor groups are organizing aggressive campaigns to make sure teachers know their rights under the Janus decision and how to exercise them. And expect litigation where states or unions adopted pre-Janus “inoculation” measures making it harder for teachers to leave their union, because some of those measures now run afoul of the court’s decision.

So who will be left in a few years? Disproportionately the hard core. Think about organizations you have been involved with — whether clubs, professional associations, or churches. Who are the people usually driving what happens? Not the average member, and certainly not the disengaged ones.

Even now, in most teachers union elections, the number of members who don’t vote dwarfs the total number of votes cast for all candidates combined. And the internal power structure is dominated not only by veterans but by the most strident ones. That’s why, historically, the internal structure of the teachers unions made it difficult for reformers or moderates to get much traction anyway. Teachers union elections are won on the flank by attacking incumbents over insufficient militancy in defense of union priorities — you don’t win by calling for compromise with management or policies that prioritize the interests of kids over those of adults.

In other words, the forces that drive union politics don’t lead to more moderation, they lead toward the extremes. That dynamic will accelerate after Janus, especially in today’s political climate. Don’t take my word for it: At their July conventions, both national teachers unions made clear their intention to become more political — even more political, most observers would say. The language was conflict, not consensus. That outcome seems the most likely one here despite the hopes of advocates on the political left and right.

Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education, a national nonprofit organization working to support educational innovation and improve educational outcomes for low-income students. He is a senior editor at ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ and serves on ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s board of directors. In addition, among other professional work, he is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, writes the blog Eduwonk.com, teaches at the University of Virginia, and is a senior advisor at Whiteboard Advisors.

The American Federation of Teachers held its biennial convention in Pittsburgh this month. Fresh off the Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME that public unions can’t charge fees to non-members — a break from long-held practice that will cost labor millions in revenues and untold membership losses — conventioneers were defiant.

“This is our moment. This is our movement,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten in her keynote address to delegates.

She supported her optimism by announcing that membership levels were at an all-time high. AFT claims 1,755,015 members, with growth that has been uninterrupted even by the 2008 recession.

But AFT’s membership numbers require a lot more scrutiny and interpretation than do those of the National Education Association.

NEA has affiliates in all 50 states. Its smallest state affiliate, in Mississippi, has almost 4,800 working members. It does have some members in the private sector and in other professions, but even its non-teachers mostly work in the field of public education.

AFT has affiliates in only 34 states. Only 21 have memberships larger than that of NEA’s Mississippi affiliate. Counting the AFT’s branch in the District of Columbia, a total of 22 affiliates are home to the overwhelming bulk of AFT members. Fifteen of those are in former agency fee states, making AFT a lot more vulnerable to the effects of Janus.

AFT has maintained membership growth because it has no presence in most of the states where NEA has lost members over the past 10 years. In fact, more than one-third of AFT’s membership works in one state, New York. One of every six AFT members works in New York City.

Six percent of AFT members are state and municipal government employees in fields unrelated to education. Seven percent are nurses and health professionals. Fifteen percent work in higher education.

That leaves 72 percent who work in K-12 public education. Since, on average, there is one education support employee for every teacher in the U.S. public school system, it is very likely that K-12 public school teachers are a minority in AFT. By contrast, about 70 percent of NEA members are certified K-12 public school teachers.

The composition of AFT’s membership is an important factor for the union’s future because reduced resources will force the union to prioritize its recruitment and retention efforts. NEA has a simpler task. Most of its members are K-12 public school teachers and most of its money comes from K-12 public school teachers. The only other group of appreciable size that it represents is education support employees. Even if NEA were to lose every support employee member, it could still carry on if its teacher numbers were stable.

AFT can’t do that. Fewer than half of its members pay the full dues amount. Union recruiters will have to decide whether to concentrate on signing up large numbers of low-dues members to keep membership totals high, or a smaller number of full-dues members in order to keep revenues up.

A post-Janus NEA will be essentially the same union, only smaller. A post-Janus AFT might disappear from even more states. It might end up with a higher percentage of teachers, or lower. It might seek to expand into different professions, or cull some of the ones it currently represents.

All of that uncertainty leaves aside the question of AFT’s future relationship with NEA. In a world with shrinking membership, will there be renewed efforts at merger, or will competition revive the old NEA-AFT raiding wars?

There are a lot of questions without any answers. Most of us are looking at this new era in labor relations as one of how unions interact with members versus non-members. But organized labor’s fate may depend on how unions interact with each other.

AFT should feel the effects of Janus first, and worst. What happens after could herald a similar fate for other public employee unions.

A defiant Randi Weingarten told a panel of sympathetic Senate Democrats this week that public-sector unions are not withering in the face of a recent Supreme Court decision that declared mandatory dues unconstitutional.

“What we are seeing is an amazing sense from our members that they are sticking with the union. Something has shifted in the last few weeks and months. I, frankly, in the 20 years, the 25 years of union advocacy that I have done, I have never seen what I am seeing right now,” Weingarten, who heads the 1.7 million–member American Federation of Teachers, said at the Tuesday hearing.

The Supreme Court two weeks ago ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that compelling dissenting public-sector employees to pay so-called agency fees violated their First Amendment rights. The 5-4 decision overturned long-standing precedent, which allowed dissenting members not to pay the portion of their dues that covered their union’s political activities but required them to support the costs of collective bargaining and other shared benefits. In addition to losing revenue from dissenters, it’s expected that unions will also see some full-fledged members drop out once freed from the mandatory portion of their dues.

The Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, an arm of party leadership as opposed to one of the chamber’s usual standing committees, called this week’s hearing to discuss the Janus decision and what it described as “the secret money campaign to take away [workers’] rights.” About a dozen Democratic senators, including Senate education committee ranking Democrat Patty Murray and policy committee chair Debbie Stabenow, were on hand.

Democrats and unions have long maintained that the First Amendment arguments in Janus were a red herring designed to disguise wealthy right-wing donors’ real goal of limiting union power and, consequently, their money and support for Democratic candidates.

“Many Americans have interpreted the Janus decision as a pure and simple case of union busting,” said Nancy MacLean, a professor at Duke University. In reality, she said, it was “a crucial piece of the radical right’s stealth plan” to remake the country in its libertarian worldview and take power out of the hands of ordinary citizens and give it to big business.

Those from the other side of the political spectrum assert that unions and their steady stream of revenue from dues have outsize influence on lawmakers in protecting costly taxpayer-funded pensions and resisting workplace reforms. Plaintiffs in the dues cases argued that for public-sector unions, standard collective bargaining is political because it involves public money for salaries, retirement, and other benefits and employment policies that affect the public, such as seniority-based layoffs.

The Janus decision is now being cast as part of a much larger struggle between conservatives and liberals over President Donald Trump’s nomination this week of Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative federal judge in Washington, D.C., to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh, if confirmed by the Senate, would fill the seat vacated by Justice Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote on such divisive issues as affirmative action, abortion, and marriage equality.

Senators said Kavanaugh is likely to continue the string of court cases, including Janus, driven by right-wing donors to promote corporate interests.

“We’ve all been reviewing the record of Mr. Kavanaugh, and he looks to me like if confirmed, he would be a poster guy for powerful corporate interests and dark money,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon.

Christine Marsh, Arizona’s 2016 Teacher of the Year and a state Senate candidate this fall, also spoke, saying teachers across the country are fighting back, buoyed by walkouts and other protests this spring.

“We are fighting groups with endless amounts of money … they will not be giving up their attacks, but we also know that no amount of money can silence America’s teachers,” Marsh said.

Most of the strikes this spring demanding increased teacher pay and greater education funding were in right-to-work states where educators weren’t required to pay union dues and the Janus decision will have no effect.

The AFT, for its part, Weingarten said, has focused its response, as early as January of this year, on engagement with members, including a re-commitment campaign. More than half a million of the union’s 800,000 members who live in states that previously had mandatory dues laws have re-committed, she said.

“People are not dropping, they’re joining. You hear the defiance in my voice, it’s because people are sticking with their union because they understand that what we can do together is impossible for people to do alone,” she added.

Weingarten’s comments contrast with the experience of the 3 million–member National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, which was anticipating 300,000 lost members and a $50 million budget cut as a result of an adverse Janus decision.

Shortly after the Janus ruling, right-wing groups started contacting members encouraging them to leave the union, witnesses said.

Some AFT members are returning those letters and emails “saying don’t bother us, I’m going to sue you for invading my privacy,” Weingarten said. The union is also looking at “a bunch of different legal options,” which she did not detail, and working to expose the right-wing groups behind those efforts, she said.

Meanwhile, numerous Democratic-controlled states have already taken steps to blunt Janus impact by passing laws giving unions greater access to employees and their contact information to make their case, providing for automatic dues deductions, and limiting opt-out windows for dissenting employees. Some of those provisions may be moot since the Supreme Court also ruled in Janus that union members must now affirmatively opt into membership — rather than requiring dissenters to opt out.

The new laws, passed in a handful of staunchly liberal states in early 2018, generally fall into a few similar categories: giving unions greater access to employees through mandatory orientations or by providing workers’ contact information; providing for automatic dues collection; or limiting the window during which employees can revoke their union membership.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in late June in Janus v. AFSCME that dissenting employees cannot be forced under the First Amendment to pay any dues to public-sector unions, even to support collective bargaining and other shared benefits. The 5-4 decision handed down June 27 was both avidly watched and widely expected.

New York lawmakers passed, and Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed, a law in April that permits unions to meet with employees during work time, requires employers to share employee contact information with unions, and allows unions not to provide certain benefits, such as professional development or some counseling and training programs, to non-members.

from Cuomo’s office directly linked the new law to the Janus ruling, and, in a speech, the Democratic governor now seeking a second term tied the decision to a litany of conservative federal policies under President Donald Trump, from the tax reform bill to limitations on immigration.

“Too often, and at the hands of this federal administration, we are seeing the labor movement going backwards. Our efforts to protect working men and women are moving labor forward, making the workplace fairer and more just than ever before,” said Cuomo, who called New York “the most heavily unionized state in the nation.”

Laws giving more protections to public-sector unions passed in at least six other states in the last legislative session: New Jersey, California, Maryland, Delaware, Hawaii, and Washington state.

The money and power public-sector unions derive from their large memberships and captive dues revenue have been a boon to the political successes of Democrats across the country. Many progressives believe the real goal of the Janus case was not lofty First Amendment considerations, but an effort by big-moneyed conservative donors to rein in that political clout.

In education, some reformers have seen teachers unions as both an ally in helping boost school spending and an impediment to implementing policies that could benefit children, like expanded charter schools or tenure reform.

â€Ŕá´Ú we go in a post-Janus world to a place where there are no longer agency fees that would ensure that workers pay for the benefits and protections they receive, it is important that workers know what their unions do, the protections they have as union members, and are put in contact with unions and make it easy for them to join and have their voices be heard,” Alex Rowell, an economic policy analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

CAP issued aĚý just after the decision, advising state lawmakers on how best to protect unions as a result of Janus, including recommending many of the same remedies states have already adopted.

AFSCME, the union that lost the case, and the American Federation of Teachers are donors to CAP. CAP and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ also share some contributors.

Democrats in Congress have alsoĚý that they say would guarantee public employees the right to organize and collectively bargain over wages, hours, and other conditions of employment; it is sure to go nowhere while Republicans retain control.

Conservatives have blasted the state-level laws as enacting unfair hurdles for dissenting employees who want to leave the union.

“Instead of leaning into the voluntary unionism and saying ‘Hey, you know what, let’s make our union representation so great that people want to voluntarily pay for it,’ they’ve gone the other way and said, ‘How can we stop people from exercising their First Amendment rights,’ ” Patrick Semmens, vice president for public information at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. The foundation represented Janus.

Many of those new laws are sure to face challenges in the wake of the Janus ruling, particularly after the court also ruled that employees must affirmatively choose to join unions, rather than requiring dissenters to opt out, which is how it works now in several states. Several of the state laws have clauses that would allow the rest of the legislation to stand if one portion is ultimately overturned.

“I think the Janus ruling went further than most observers expected, and it definitely calls into question the legality of some of the laws that are trying to trap public employees into paying,” Vinnie Vernuccio, a senior fellow at the conservative Mackinac Center, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who in May signed a law expanding unions’ access to workers, said in a statement that some provisions may be in conflict with an eventual Janus ruling.

“In the event that appropriate clarifying amendments are necessary following the Supreme Court’s decision, I will work closely with the sponsors to enact any required changes,” he said in aĚý.

Lawsuits are already percolating through the courts based on the Supreme Court ruling: At least one group of teachers is suing for restitution of dues they’ve already paid. That group of California educators is led by Rebecca Friedrichs, the plaintiff in a similar lawsuit in 2016 that ended in a draw after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

To be sure, there have also been anti-union bills proposed and passed during the same time period in several states.

Several would have prohibited automatic deduction of union dues from employees’ paychecks; others would have required employers to hold elections to recertify union representation or banned public-sector unions from using union dues for “partisan” activities, including lobbying and voter registration drives.

And Iowa lawmakers in early 2017Ěý that limited the scope of what public-sector unions could bargain for to just wages, with some other exceptions for police and firefighters.

Immediately after the ruling, conservative groups began a concerted campaign to tell employees they no longer have to be union members,Ěý.

Unions have vowed to fight those efforts. National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen GarcĂ­a inĚý said the national union will help state affiliates with a “defense against the dark arts” campaign.

Some states already aimed to limit those groups’ access to employees; in California, the dates and locations of union orientations cannot be revealed publicly.

Cuomo signed an executive order prohibiting disclosure of New York public employees’ contact information; he also said more laws might be necessary.

“In New York, we say no way, no how to union busting. New York is a union state, and as long as I am governor of the state of New York, we will do everything in our power to protect union members and ensure the labor movement continues to deliver on the promise of the American dream,” he said.

Other states’ union protection efforts include:

●ĚýCalifornia: ´Ą˛ÔĚý prohibits disclosure of the time and place of new employee union orientations, requires unions rather than employers to collect union enrollment or cancellation forms, and mandates that employers confer with unions on any communications about the Janus decision or union membership. It passed in June 2018 and followed rules in 2017 that required employers to provide unions with employees’ contact information and give them the regular opportunity to meet with new employees.

●ĚýDelaware: ´ĄĚý passed in March would let unions set the terms under which employees could end automatic dues payments; if they don’t do so, the term would automatically be the period 15 to 30 days before the employee’s work anniversary date.

●ĚýHawaii: ´ĄĚý would require employees who no longer want dues automatically deducted from their paychecks to notify unions within 30 days of the anniversary of the first deduction; the unions would then notify employers.

●ĚýMaryland: Two separate laws, one coveringĚý and the other coveringĚý, require unions to have access to new employee orientations and mandate that employers provide unions with employees’ contact information, passed in spring 2018.

●ĚýNew Jersey: The “” allows unions to meet with new employees, requires employers to turn over employees’ contact information, and requires employers who discourage employees from joining a union or encourage them to quit a union to reimburse the union for lost dues.

●ĚýWashington: The legislature passed, and Gov. Jay Inslee signed, bills that would provide forĚý ˛š˛ÔťĺĚý.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Walton Family Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the California Community Foundation provide financial support to the Center for American Progress and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

When one cuts through all the rhetoric and hyperbole surrounding the decision in Janus v. AFSCME, one finds that question at its heart. For Mark Janus, a law that requires paying an agency fee to a union he doesn’t belong to and that advocates positions he disagrees with is clearly unconstitutional, the view the court endorsed by a slim 5-4 majority. The fact that the fee is calculated to exclude the cost of explicitly political union activities — like supporting a particular candidate — is of no bearing since even job-related advocacy, like opposing tenure reform, demanding more costly benefits, or supporting seniority-based hiring, has significant policy and political implications.

Justice Elena Kagan’s unusually impassioned dissent meets this argument with the legal equivalent of “give me a break.” Over 40 years ago, the court rejected a constitutional challenge to agency fees as a reasonable governmental approach to fostering labor peace and guarding against free riders (employees who benefit from union representation but don’t pay for it). And, the dissent continues, there is no principled reason to overturn that precedent now, especially in light of the massive disruption that the majority’s holding will cause. (Full disclosure: Kagan and I were colleagues in the White House Counsel’s Office in the first Clinton administration, and she is as smart and decent as they come.)

I stopped paying my bar dues over a decade ago, when I turned my full professional attention to school reform. So I offer these views not as a former constitutional lawyer, but as a longtime school administrator. Disagreements about the legal merits of the decision aside, what will this allegedly tectonic shift in labor law mean in real-world terms?

Education reformers have been almost giddy over the Janus ruling, a sentiment rooted in hard experience rather than a reflection of an anti-union animus or a “corporate” (read: Koch brothers) orientation. In many states, including my native New Jersey, the teachers union is by far the most powerful and well-funded political organization. This power is deployed with devastating, indeed, often thuggish effect to oppose virtually every page of the reformer’s playbook: tenure reform, educator accountability, parental choice (especially regarding charter schools), and summative assessments honestly geared to high academic standards, to name a few.

I vividly recall a moment as education commissioner that illustrates the point. Sitting in a state legislator’s airless office, I was seeking his support for ending Last In, First Out, the pernicious rule that, in the event of a layoff, requires preserving the job of a demonstrably poor teacher and firing the most talented educator in the district if the former is even a day more senior. His response: I agree with you, but if I support this, they have told me they will take me out, and I’m not prepared to lose my job.

An idle threat? Ask Democratic Senate President Steve Sweeney, a proud union member in his own right. When he had the temerity to prioritize the state’s fiscal solvency over the New Jersey Education Association’s demand to fully fund the pension system, the union endorsed Sweeney’s Republican opponent, . In the end, the union’s $5 million media campaign failed to unseat Sweeney, but the message was sent: Cross us at your peril.

These are hardly isolated incidents. I would be hard pressed to name a single big-city superintendent, independent policy advocate, or state education official who has not experienced the in terrorem influence of the seemingly bottomless treasury and often brilliantly effective (if frequently untruthful) media and political operations of the local, state, and national teachers unions.

Not surprisingly, then, Janus has caused visions of sugar plums to dance in reformers’ heads. By the court’s own reckoning, “billions of dollars” have been “transferred to public-sector unions in violation of the First Amendment” over the years. In the most consequential line in the majority opinion, not another penny may be collected “unless the employee affirmatively consents.” (Thus, no games allowed with presumptive fees and short opt-out windows, killing in the cradle a wave of union-sponsored legislation intended to blunt the decision’s impact.)

Although quantifying the actual impact of Janus is impossible, leaked internal documents indicate that unions themselves are projecting the loss of hundreds of thousands of members and as much as $50 million in lost dues. The California Teachers Association alone anticipates slashing its budget by $20 million as a direct result of the ruling. Whatever the actual figure, reformers believe, the opinion will put a material dent in the unions’ ability to fund their political agenda.

Correspondingly, unions and many progressives view the decision in quasi-apocalyptic terms. Janus, they argue, will cripple public-sector unions at a time when they serve as a critical countervailing force to the powerful financial and corporate interests that have seized control of our political system. Unions are already under assault, they point out, as evidenced by declining membership and well-funded Republican-led movements to crush them in states like Wisconsin and Michigan. Especially in the Citizens United era, they contend, the Janus decision has the practical effect of ceding critical ground to the likes of the Koch brothers on the right flank of American politics.

Beyond these political consequences, as Kagan’s dissent elaborates, Janus upends an established legislative balance now embodied in countless laws and contracts, “alter[ing] … the relationships of public employees and employers in … wholly unexpected ways.” More fundamentally, by inappropriately “weaponizing” the First Amendment, she suggests, the court has precipitously ended a dynamic and democratically vital debate at the state level about how best to structure the relationship between public employees and government.

For several reasons, those mourning and those celebrating the untimely demise of agency fees and the new order engendered by Janus both need to take a step back from their rhetorical excesses. Earth has not spun off its axis, of course, but neither has the power of public-employee unions suffered a terminally grievous wound. Kagan makes a compelling case that there are serious doctrinal consequences associated with the court’s reasoning — for example, to the revered (if routinely manipulated) principle of stare decisis, as well as to the balance between democratic government (majority rules!) and black-robed invocation of unyielding constitutional protections (no matter what the majority wants, the First Amendment forbids it!).

The practical consequences of the decision, however, are likely considerably less profound than both detractors and proponents have maintained.

Let’s start with finances. Cynics have suggested that the apocalyptic revenue projections leaked by the National Education Association and its affiliates represent something of a litigation feint in light of the large reserves they have maintained and other ameliorative strategies at their disposal. Taking their numbers at face value, however, the cuts would represent only a roughly 15 percent reduction — painful, but not nearly enough to eliminate the teachers unions’ status as the biggest, baddest, best-funded voice in state and local politics. Just for grins, imagine a confiscatory tax that immediately stripped Mike Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett of even 25 percent of their wealth, which is measured in the many tens of billions apiece. Infuriating to them? Undoubtedly. Unconstitutional? Probably. But likely to affect their spending habits or influence? Not a chance.

Moreover, especially in the realm of education, effective political activism is by no means perfectly correlated with a union-friendly legal environment, much less agency fees. This past year has seen teachers successfully strike for higher salaries in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, and Kentucky, making 2017-18 the highest-water year for educator activism since the Al Shanker–led job actions in New York City in 1968. Notably, none of these states allowed agency fees even before Janus. (Indeed, 28 states already prohibited them.) And in each case, it was far from clear whether the union was leading or merely riding the crest of the wave. Whatever the answer, this history undermines any argument that a ban on agency fees strikes a fatal blow to effective educator advocacy.

To be sure, the ruling disrupts dozens of laws and hundreds of contracts, a practical reality the significance of which should not be minimized. When the dust settles, however, I suspect the changes may well be reminiscent of the inevitable response to comprehensive tax reform, what one might call the build-a-better-mousetrap phenomenon. Creative accountants, aggressive lawyers, and effective lobbyists seem always to find ways to construct workarounds. And, trust me, union lawyers are already hard at work on post-Janus legislation (as has already been passed in New Jersey and New York, for example). The decision’s holding that employees must opt in presents a tough challenge, but I wouldn’t underestimate the potential for creative measures to mitigate the practical impact of the ruling.

Taken together, these considerations cast real doubt that Janus will be the game-changer that education reformers anticipate or unions fear — at least in the ways proponents and opponents of the decision have articulated. , however, that hardly suggests that the decision is not a watershed in other ways. Most fundamentally, at least in the case of teachers unions, the decision should precipitate a crisis of relevance, with a corresponding and entirely salutary period of reflection about how best to attract and retain members post-Janus. As Dan Weisberg wisely notes, the only way the decision actually reduces revenue would be “because a significant number of their own members decided that their union hasn’t earned a chunk of every paycheck.” As recent have made clear, the unions have some work to do to establish and retain their relevance with many members.

Take a typical New Jersey teacher, for example. She is passionate, effective, and committed to her craft. At a salary of $75,000, she knows she fares well compared with her peers in other states, but she also feels grossly underpaid given the high cost of living and a nagging (and correct) sense that she is not rewarded financially at a level commensurate with her contribution to society. Against this backdrop, she is asked (but no longer required) to pay around $850 annually in union dues.

How might she think about this request? Like anyone else, she will ask what value she will get for her money — and there is plenty. . Whether required to pay dues or not, she is civic-minded and comfortable supporting that advocacy. Similarly, she understands the criticality of having teacher voice well represented in the legislature, and happy to pay for it, even if she does not always agree on particular policy matters. She has also seen colleagues’ livelihoods threatened by arbitrary personnel decisions and understands the appropriateness of paying in advance for representation and advice, just as .

On the other side of the ledger, she was not at all happy to learn that the New Jersey Education Association leadership is , with an average salary among the top brass of $525,000. And did she really want one penny of her hard-earned income contributing to a $5 million effort to ? While she understands the importance of job security, she was deeply troubled by recently leaked tapes in which .

Even in less extreme circumstances, she remembers those times when she gave her all to help her students learn, only to see them assigned the following year to a classroom led by a colleague who lacked the skills or commitment to continue their growth. How comfortable is she funding an organization that is so deeply resistant to the idea of educator accountability for student success?

Obviously, I am not in the head of this hypothetical teacher (although I have had occasion to hear from innumerable real ones about this very question). I offer this example only to make a point.

The real significance of Janus is not that it represents a mortal financial blow to public-sector unions or the political causes they historically support. While the hit is certainly not trivial, they will remain a colossus in New York, New Jersey, California, and other states where they already represent the dominant force in state politics, just as the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers will retain that status on the national stage.

The real significance, instead, is that unions will now be forced to be vastly more attuned to the value proposition they offer their members. When support is no longer mandated, it must be earned. The real question is how effectively public-sector unions can rise to that challenge. My hope and expectation is that, after a period of mourning and soul-searching, they will do just that.

Chris Cerf is a former New Jersey commissioner of education, deputy chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, and, most recently, superintendent of the Newark Public Schools.

Across the country, educators are striking for basic education funding, grappling with the threat of mass shootings, and working under a federal Department of Education that seeks toĚý.

But one of the issues most likely to impact teachers is currently not on most of their radars. A recentĚý found that three-quarters of teachers had heard very little or nothing at all about theĚý, which eliminated the “fair share” laws that fund teachers unions’ work and could lead to aĚý and resources.

Unions are essential to teachers’ ability to advocate for themselves and their students, and the Janus decision could strike a tremendous blow to teachers’ influence on education policy. But we teachers shouldn’t resign ourselves to this fate. We can continue to lift up our voices on the issues that matter to us by becoming more involved in our unions to make sure they stay strong.

However, if we are standing up for our unions, they, in turn, must stand for our beliefs. In this new era in which union membership will likely no longer be a given, teachers unions will have to work especially hard to engage their members and actively fight for the issues we care about.

My union is worth fighting for. Teachers unions have played a critical role advocating for resources that fund our schools and protections for our educators. Their advocacy has granted me financial security that I could only dream of when I was a kid. In the single-parent household in which I grew up, money was always tight and on our minds. We would go to the hospital only if one of us was in great pain, and we never went to the dentist.

But as a member of the United Federation of Teachers, I have the peace of mind that comes with affordable health insurance and knowing I will be able to retire with a pension that will support me in my retirement years. This is not the case for many teachers in places with a less robust union presence, like West Virginia and Kentucky, where teachers went on strike earlier this year to demand a living wage.

My colleagues across the nation agree that we need unions. The same Educators for Excellence survey found that 94 percent of unionized teachers regard unions as essential or important, as do 74 percent of nonunionized teachers. Educators know that unions speak on behalf of all teachers, and their strong voice benefits teachers and families alike.

Still, the Janus decision might lead to a loss in union membership — and the funds that make unions such a powerful voice for our profession.

If union leaders don’t step up to meet these new challenges, their ability to fight for their members will erode. The need is clear: While educators value union advocacy on bread-and-butter issues, like salaries and job protections, the survey also found that many teachers feel their unions are out of step on policy issues. Fifty-two percent of unionized teachers said their union represents their perspective only somewhat, and for 20 percent, it was not very much or not at all. Teachers who feel that their unions don’t reflect their opinions may decide that the best way to get them to listen is to vote with their feet and renounce their membership.

Post-Janus, our unions will have to work hard to close the gaps between what teachers want their unions to prioritize and what they have been prioritizing. It needs to be easier for members to share our views. This is possible when we have a chance to truly engage with our union leaders through, for example, more frequent school visits, better access to information, and online voting in union elections. If teachers see that their unions care about their opinions, they are more likely to remain members.

During tough times, people need to stand together. I plan to not only stay a dues-paying member, but also to attend more meetings and share my opinions with my union rep. In return, I expect my union to be more representative of its members’ diverse views as it charts a path forward to strengthen our schools and our profession.

Nicole Manning has taught high school math for 12 years and is a member of Educators for Excellence–New York.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito, who has invited legal challenges like Janus in previous cases, crafted a far-reaching opinion that confirmed union backers’ worst fears: More than simply striking down agency fees, the court determined that workers must take the affirmative step of opting into union membership, rather than opting out.

In doing so, they overruled the precedent set in in 1977’s Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. In that case, the court found that while unions could not compel nonmembers to contribute funds for the purpose of political organizing — ruled to be an unconstitutional form of compelled speech — they could collect fees to support the cost of collective bargaining.

This distinction was meant to curb the problem of “free riders,” nonmembers who reap the benefits of a powerful union bargaining on their behalf but don’t contribute with dues. Agency fees have become a critical source of financing as both private and public union membership have declined, standing in for a significant proportion of lost dues.

The Janus ruling will cast a particularly long shadow over the education debate, in which teachers unions — the largest in the country — are a dominant player.ĚýCut offĚýfrom untold millions of dollars in funding, and faced with the new opt-in burden of recruiting new members, unions will have to work twice as hard to maintain their considerable influence over policy questions like education funding, private school choice, and standards and accountability.

Here are four key points from Alito’s majority opinion:

Dismissing “Labor Peace”

Alito attacked the Abood framework by vitiating its aims, among which was the cause of “labor peace.” The court in 1977 asserted that without the ability to extract agency fees, unions could hardly act as a singular, effective advocate for employees in a workplace. Multiple forces would spring up within firms, claiming to represent workers and attempting to strike separate labor agreements with management. Chaos would be the result, the justices predicted.

But Alito argued that the past 41 years have proven that worry unfounded. Unions representing federal employees, such as at the U.S. Post Office, are not allowed to collect fees from nonmembers, but their membership still numbers in the millions and brooks no competition. Similarly, unions in the 28 so-called right-to-work states, which already ban agency fees, effectively advocate for the interests of members and nonmembers alike.

“Tłóąđ Abood court assumed that designation of a union as the exclusive representative of all the employees in a unit and the exaction of agency fees are inextricably linked, but that is simply not true,” Alito wrote.

The Problem of Free Riders

Next, Alito turned to the problem of free riders, who shirk paying dues but can still count on unions to bargain for them and represent them in grievance hearings. Without being able to compel some form of payment, union backers say, bargaining units will be unwilling or unable to advance nonmembers’ interests — and it would be unfair to ask them to.

Alito rejected that reasoning, arguing that the representation of all workers in a given shop is the responsibility assumed by a union when its members vote it into existence.

Unions are obliged to fulfill that responsibility whether or not they are rewarded for it by nonmembers like plaintiff Mark Janus, he wrote, and the privileges they gain from being the sole designated force arguing on behalf of labor — most importantly, a seat at the table in negotiations with management — “greatly outweigh any extra burden imposed by the duty of providing fair representation for nonmembers.”

Interestingly, Alito did leave open the possibility of a kind of fee-for-service model, with unions imposing a specific charge on nonmembers for specific duties, like representing them in grievance hearings.

“Individual nonmembers could be required to pay for that service or could be denied union representation altogether,” he wrote. “Thus, agency fees cannot be sustained on the ground that unions would otherwise be unwilling to represent nonmembers.”

Speech of Public Concern

The meat of Alito’s opinion came in his arguments around free speech. Previously, the court distinguished between speech related to matters of private concern (e.g., the fashion choices of a colleague), which the state as an employer can reasonably restrict, and speech related to public concern (e.g., how a public employer impacts the welfare of the public at large), which it cannot.

Agency fees, he wrote, represent a form of compelled speech of public concern: No, they don’t support a political cause or candidate, but the very act of collective bargaining against a governmental employer necessarily involves the public interest. In its negotiations with the state of Illinois, where Mark Janus works, AFSCME advances argumentsĚýabout public finance, debt, and taxation that may conflict with the deeply held views of those who are compelled to pay agency fees.

Given the unique influence of teachers unions in the public sector, Alito observed, mandatory support for bargaining is like a compelled statement on particular questions of education policy. He enumerated a long list of such questions:

“Should teacher pay be based on seniority, the better to retain experienced teachers? Or should schools adopt merit pay systems to encourage teachers to get the best results out of their students? Should districts transfer more experienced teachers to the lower-performing schools that may have the greatest need for their skills, or should those teachers be allowed to stay where they have put down roots? Should teachers be given tenure protection and, if so, under what conditions? On what grounds and pursuant to what procedures should teachers be subject to discipline or dismissal? How should teacher performance and student progress be measured — by standardized tests or other means?”

In short, he concluded, the government cannot restrict or compel speech on these types of issues.

Opting In

Ultimately, Alito delivered a full repudiation of Abood, writing that any payment toward a union — whether in the form of agency fees or, presumably, dues — violates the First Amendment unless the employee clearly agrees to it.

“By agreeing to pay, nonmembers are waiving their First Amendment rights, and such a waiver cannot be presumed,” he wrote. “Rather, to be effective, the waiver must be freely given and shown by ‘clear and compelling’ evidence. Unless employees clearly and affirmatively consent before any money is taken from them, this standard cannot be met.”

This requirement of “affirmative consent” will clearly pose an obstacle to labor unions seeking to build membership and fill their coffers. Now, many maintain an opt-out policy that assumes a default position of union membership and requires nonmembers to take the extra step of declaring their unwillingness to join. From now on, the reverse will be true — they will have to directly solicit, and gain, agreements to join their organizations.

“Public employee unions will lose a secure source of financial support,” she wrote. “State and local governments … will need to find new ways of managing their workforces. Across the country, the relationships of public employees and employers will alter in both predictable and wholly unexpected ways.”

In the “predictable” camp: Unions will undoubtedly lose membership, funding, and, therefore, influence. A recentĚý estimated that public-sector unions could lose more than 700,000 members as a result of the ruling. In the majority opinion, the court established the equivalent of a right-to-work model for public workers all over the U.S. Undoing 41 years of precedent, the likely result is that many teachers who are now content to pay for union membership will think of their wallets first and opt not to.

Less clear, according to Kagan, is how the more than 20 states that currently authorize such fair-share provisions will deal with suddenly having to “come up with new ways — elaborated in new statutes — to structure relations between government employers and their workers.” The ruling affects thousands of current contracts covering millions of workers. Kagan, born and raised in Manhattan, noted that New York City alone has agreed to agency fees in 144 contracts with 97 public-sector unions. The court acted, she wrote, “with no real clue of what will happen next — of how its action will alter public-sector labor relations.”

In what is perhaps the dissent’s most acid passage, Kagan took direct aim at the conservative majority’s oft-espoused embrace of precedent and the right of states to manage their own affairs.

“Tłóąđ majority’s road runs long,” she wrote. “And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices.”

The majority, she said, “wanted to pick the winning side in what should be — and until now, has been — an energetic policy debate. Some state and local governments (and the constituents they serve) think that stable unions promote healthy labor relations and thereby improve the provision of services to the public. Other state and local governments (and their constituents) think, to the contrary, that strong unions impose excessive costs and impair those services. Americans have debated the pros and cons for many decades — in large part, by deciding whether to use fair-share arrangements. Yesterday, 22 states were on one side, 28 on the other (ignoring a couple of in-betweeners).”

“Today,” she concluded, “that healthy — that democratic — debate ends.”

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, dug in more deeply than recent court precedent, harking back to the nation’s founding documents and the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right of free association.

“When speech is compelled … additional damage is done,” Alito wrote. “In that situation, individuals are coerced into betraying their convictions. Forcing free and independent individuals to endorse ideas they find objectionable is always demeaning…”

People like Mark Janus, the Illinois child support specialist at the heart of matter, are often described as “free riders” by union activists because they may reap the benefits of union bargaining without having to pay for it. But Janus, in Alito’s words, “argues that he is not a free rider on a bus headed for a destination that he wishes to reach but is more like a person shanghaied for an unwanted voyage.”

Interestingly, the fiery matchup between Kagan and Alito pitted two justices born into families of teachers. Kagan’s mother taught at Hunter College Elementary School, and she has two brothers who teach at public schools. Alito’s father was a high school teacher and his mother is a retired schoolteacher.

Although Janus himself is not an educator, the case that bears his name largely wrestled with a precedent that grew out of tensions in the nation’s public schools. The case overturned Wednesday isĚý, in which the 1977 Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Motor City’s teachers union over public school teachers who objected to paying union dues for collective bargaining. Abood acknowledged the rights of workers not to join the union and not to finance disagreeable political behavior. But given that unions have a legal duty to represent everyone equally, the court aimed to thwart the free-rider problem by allowing unions to compel dues.

In his ruling, Alito led the conservative wing of the court in giving short shrift to the notion that the loss of such fees poses an existential threat to unions. While acknowledging unions could “experience unpleasant transition costs in the short term,” he said such discomfort must be weighed against “the considerable windfall that unions have received … for the past 41 years.”

Kagan and her liberal colleagues disagreed. She wrote that the court’s decision “creates a collective action problem of nightmarish proportions.”

“Tłóąđre is no sugarcoating today’s opinion,” she wrote. “Tłóąđ majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this nation’s law — and in its economic life — for over 40 years. As a result, it prevents the American people, acting through their state and local officials, from making important choices about workplace governance. And it does so by weaponizing the First Amendment, in a way that unleashes judges, now and in the future, to intervene in economic and regulatory policy.”

Imagine, for example, if you demanded the right to withhold tax money from your local fire department just because you disagree with the mayor’s politics. You’d be laughed out of court. And if you weren’t, and you could withhold your taxes along with other dissenters, you’d thwart the rights of the majority who voted in the mayor.

It’s a moot point now, though. The unions lost. Among other things, this means the nation’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, face a new reality in which a large chunk of their annual revenue has transformed from guaranteed dues into optional contributions from members across the country. In her convincing dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan forecast a dire, but realistic, future for public-sector unions in which “[e]mployees (including those who love the union) realize that they can get the same benefits even if they let their memberships expire. And as more and more stop paying dues, those left must take up the financial slack (and anyway, begin to feel like suckers) — so they too quit the union.” In theory, they could be staring at a budget hole big enough to cripple their operations.

But all the attention on this short-term financial challenge has obscured a blessing in disguise that could matter much more over the long run. Teachers unions are now forced to finally confront an existential threat that’s been brewing for years: They’re losing touch with more and more of their members.

You don’t have to take my word for it. AFT President Randi Weingarten acknowledged this challenge she co-authored with Educators for Excellence co-CEO Evan Stone (disclosure: I’m on the board of E4E). She pointed to showing that only about half of teachers view their union as “essential,” with 1 in 10 saying they “could do without” the union, 52 percent saying they felt unions represented their views only somewhat and 1 in 5 saying they didn’t feel they were represented in their union’s policy decisions at all, and about 40 percent saying they’d at least consider opting out of union membership or dues if given the choice.

You can see these statistics reflected in the declining unionization rates among teachers.

Many factors could be fueling teachers’ growing alienation from their unions. The past six months have shown that teachers no longer need to rely on union leadership to advocate for basics like higher salaries. The protests in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and beyond were largely grassroots movements, organized largely with free tools like Facebook. The educators leading those charges often blew past the limits on negotiating positions and tactics that unions tried to set.

Our own research has long suggested that a significant number of teachers don’t want their hard-earned salaries going toward union-led defenses of incompetent or abusive colleagues.

Whatever the exact causes, this is a problem teachers unions would have needed to solve to survive, even without an immediate crisis created by the Supreme Court. After all, if the unions really do see millions of dollars disappear from their coffers in the months ahead, it will be because a significant number of their own members decided their union hasn’t earned a chunk of every paycheck.

The good news is that there are some practical steps teachers unions could take to both solve the short-term revenue gaps they might face post-Janus and win back the trust of their current members.

Right now, unions wear two hats. They’re collective bargaining agents, representing public school teachers in contract negotiations, grievances, and disciplinary cases. And they’re political advocates, speaking on behalf of their members in Washington and state capitals, and helping to elect handpicked candidates at all levels of government. With fewer resources, unions probably can’t afford to play both roles.

Unions could opt to greatly reduce their political activity and focus exclusively on collective bargaining, district by district — but this probably wouldn’t end well. Though they are often among the most powerful political forces in state capitals, they are already losing ground legislatively on a host of issues, from defined-benefit pensions to tenure. How effectively could they really negotiate on issues locally when many legislatures, freed from the unions’ political clout, would preempt or limit whatever victories they gain in collective bargaining?

The more radical move would be to get out of the collective bargaining business and become professional associations — think the American Medical Association or the Association of Trial Lawyers. It’s a role the National Education Association once played many decades ago. In that capacity, the NEA didn’t negotiate salaries and benefits, but it still made life better for millions of teachers by advocating for basic school funding during the Great Depression, the G.I. Bill after World War II, and civil rights legislation.

As professional associations, unions could put all their resources and political clout behind a long-term plan for elevating the teaching profession through higher pay, more rigorous performance standards, and better working conditions. They could support their members’ grassroots advocacy for this agenda without any obligation to defend individual members who engage in misconduct or who simply aren’t up to the job, a change that would probably win them new allies.

On a practical level, this may be the unions’ best chance to survive in a hostile political and legal climate that shows no signs of improving. But it’s not a surrender — far from it. It’s a path that would let unions reclaim control of their own fate and become a force for positive change in education. If union leaders have the courage to take it, we may look back a decade from now and see that teachers turned a short-term loss in Janus into a long-term win.

Daniel Weisberg is chief executive officer of TNTP.

Turning to the education world, one key question now becomes: Given that required agency fees have been struck down, how many members, and how much revenue, are teachers unions set to lose?

As reported exclusively by ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s Mike Antonucci late last month, internal documents at the National Education Association paint a bleak picture:

“When delegates to the National Education Association meet in Minneapolis in July, union leaders will introduce a two-year budget that cuts expenditures by $50 million, an estimated 13 percent reduction from this year.

“NEA’s budget committee forecasts a two-year loss of 307,000 members if, as expected later in the spring, the Supreme Court eliminates agency fees — mandatory costs to workers who don’t become union members but are covered by union agreements. Those near-term losses will almost entirely occur in the 22 states where fees are still charged, erasing post-recession membership gains in places like California, New Jersey, and New York.” (Read more)

Indeed, earlier this week Antonucci published new numbers showing that the only membership gains for the NEA were in those agency-fee regions, which are now set to be hit hardest following Janus:

“Tłóąđ stakes are high for the nation’s largest union, and NEA’s membership numbers for 2017 illustrate why. The union will immediately lose revenue from the estimated 100,000 fee-payers it represents. It will also lose dues money from those who are currently members, but won’t be once they realize they no longer need to pay anything to the union.

“NEA had 2,612,027 active members working in the public school system in 2017 — an increase of 0.7 percent from the year before — plus an additional 370,000 retired and student members. The modest overall growth disguises the differences between trends in the agency fee states and the right-to-work states.

“In states where NEA represents fee-payers, the union had 29,317 more members. In right-to-work states, it had 12,268 fewer members.” (Read more)

In addition to membership projections, the union has also begun cutting its own internal staff, eliminating 41 staff positions through buyouts, early retirements, and attrition. (NEA employs more than 500 people at its Washington, D.C., headquarters; the average salary is $123,613 plus benefits.)

Read more of the fine print from today’s Supreme Court decision, as well as 14 ways the Janus verdict could reshape the membership and politics of America’s teachers unions.

Even well before before the ruling was handed down, we’d gotten a good preview of how unions plan to respond to the new world order.

One smart strategy has been to create a veil of destitution. The National Education Association cut its budget by $50 million, and its star performer, the California Teachers Association — ground zero for potential impact — slashed its own budget by $20 million. CTA takes in 10 times that much annually and has several hundred millions in reserve, but it’s best not to let teachers think it is awash in cash and not in need of their money.

Another strategy is an increased level of activism, as unions remind their members that they have their backs. That’s why, without a doubt, the back-to-school season will also mean back-to-strike, as unions hope to recover some of the momentum of last spring’s successful job actions. Provided the unions don’t overplay their hands, it should be an effective ploy, since teachers still look to unions to bargain for better pay. Teachers also look to unions to defend them against accusations from schools, parents, and students; for that reason, school districts should expect to see local unions become more vigilant on grievances.

Although the ruling makes it clear that teachers must affirmatively opt in to membership, unions will still find new and creative ways to make it easy to join (hold out for the free gift cards!) — and exceptionally inconvenient to leave. For example, New York passed a law, which the decision presumably does not nullify, that requires districts to notify the union within 30 days of making a new hire, along with providing contact information and even the best time for the union to get in touch.

But while these strategies may solidify the base, they may not be enough to keep most teachers in the fold. Teachers unions have already experienced a roughly 10 percent decline in membership over the past couple of decades, and report that only half of teachers see their union as “essential,” that many find their dues too high and their political activity too leftist, and that they do not share the unions’ position on many education issues.

As much of this disenfranchisement skews toward younger teachers, the unions may have to prove their relevance by considering a number of moves that do not come naturally to them.

What sort of positions ought the unions reconsider? Probably not their opposition to charter schools, even though younger teachers seem to have no problem with charters, because that position is not going to drive membership down. But others, like the stringent defense of ineffective teachers, protection of seniority privileges, and an anachronistic pay system, are issues that are more personal to teachers — ones with which they have had firsthand, and often quite negative, experiences.

More than half of all teachers think too many colleagues who ought not be in the classroom are still there, courtesy of their unions. Nothing drags teachers down more quickly than having to work alongside peers who don’t do their jobs well. But with the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers together contributing more to American political campaigns than any other organization or corporation, they’ve been a key part of ensuring that in the majority of states, instructional ineffectiveness is not explicitly articulated as grounds for dismissal. This makes it nearly impossible for a district to fire a mathematics teacher who just happens to not be very good at teaching math.

When former teachers cite poor working conditions as a reason for leaving the profession, they generally aren’t referring to unclean bathrooms, but having been surrounded by teachers and leaders who defeat any notion of collegiality.

Most teachers also recognize the harm inflicted by seniority rights that unions go to the mat to protect. They were themselves novices once, handed a class or assigned to a school where no veteran teachers wanted to be. Nearly 7 out of 10 younger teachers, closer to the experience, see the damage caused by inflexible seniority privileges, but even a majority of older teachers view them as harmful.

It’s understandable how unions painted themselves into this corner, taking their obligations to the extreme, with no money worries to stop them. Today’s ruling certainly means big changes for how unions collect revenue, but the impact on the bottom line doesn’t have to be catastrophic. It’s time for teachers unions to decide: Do they double down on the old rhetoric or bring their stances in line with the beliefs of the 21st century teacher?

Unions can continue to defend the few, but it might come at the literal cost of the many teachers who fail to see enough value in unions to continue paying their dues.

Kate Walsh is president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

In a poll conducted byĚý, a firm used by many Republican organizations, nearly two-thirds of Americans said that union members shouldn’t have to pay mandatory union fees.

The majority opposition to the fees was consistent across race, gender, even members of union households. The one area it varied was by political party. While 76 percent of Republicans supported opting out of mandatory fees, Democrats were split, with 48 percent against mandatory fees and 47 percent in favor of choice.

Members of Conservative Leaders for Education — the group that commissioned the poll — applauded the court’s ruling.

“Public opinion is clearly on the side of the Supreme Court’s decision. Only a small percentage of people think it’s right for teachers to have their pay taken without their permission,” said the group’s president, . “Teachers, and all government workers, should have a choice, and exercising that choice should not put their jobs at risk.”

In its Janus ruling, the court said that the fees, which are used to fund collective bargaining and other shared benefits, were a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech for employees who don’t agree with their union’s policy.

“Neither an agency fee nor any other form of payment to a public-sector union may be deducted from an employee, nor may any other attempt be made to collect such a payment, unless the employee affirmatively consents to pay,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court’s five-justice conservative majority. The ruling clarified that employees will have to opt into paying fees, a sharp departure from common practice now, when the burden is on dissenting members to opt out.

The ruling overturns a prior Supreme Court ruling, Abood, which in 1977 ruled that union members did not have to pay dues to support their union’s political activities but were still required to pay agency fees to prevent them from becoming “free riders.” The court this time around agreed with plaintiff Mark Janus, an Illinois state worker, that when dealing with public-sector unions it’s almost impossible to distinguish political action from advocacy done to protect compensation, pensions, and other conditions of collective bargaining.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a dissenting opinion, criticizing the majority for overturning the precedent set in Abood.

“Its decision will have large-scale consequences,” Kagan wrote. “Public employee unions will lose a secure source of financial support. State and local governments that thought fair-share provisions furthered their interests will need to find new ways of managing their workforces.”

A 2017 also found that a majority of respondents — 44 percent — oppose the mandatory fees for teachers. But another poll, conducted by , found that public opinion was evenly split on the matter, with 45 percent of Americans supporting agency fees and 45 percent opposing.

Nearly 800 people were contacted by landline and cellphone for the poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.46 percent.Ěý

Disclosure: The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation provides financial support to Conservative Leaders for Education and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

President Donald Trump tweeted that the court “rules in favor of non-union workers who are now, as an example, able to support a candidate of his or her choice” and called the ruling a loss for Democrats. While the question of public-sector unions using agency fees to endorse specific candidates was not at stake in the Janus case, the arguments did raise the question of whether all issues that unions negotiate are inherently political.

Many charter school and school choice advocates joined conservatives in celebrating the ruling, which they say could open the door to more school reforms. (See the full text of the decision.)

One of the first to respond to the announcement, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, posted a video featuring teachers union leaders Lily Eskelsen García and Randi Weingarten that argued that “corporate interests have been rigging the system against workers.”

Former education secretary John King tweeted an article written by Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers president, that said teachers want their voices heard.

Weingarten tweeted that the union will remain strong despite the ruling.

Erika Sanzi, a parent advocate and visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, responded, noting that polls indicate that a majority of Americans believe union members should not have to pay mandatory dues.

Many Democrats took the opportunity to express their support for unions overall.

Other critics charged that the case was bankrolled by wealthy conservative donors and the result of a “stolen” Supreme Court seat, a reference to Senate Republicans’ in 2016, holding the slot open for a conservative justice.

Then, to cap off the final day of the court’s current session, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who sided with the majority in the Janus ruling, that he will retire effective July 31.

Forcing dissenting employees to pay dues violates First Amendment protections against compelling speech, Justice Samuel A. Alito wrote for the majority in the 5-4 decision that was both highly anticipated and widely expected.

“Compelling individuals to mouth support for views they find objectionable violates that cardinal constitutional command, and in most contexts, any such effort would be universally condemned,” Alito wrote.

A few hours after the decision was announced, news broke that Justice Anthony Kennedy, 81, would retire, giving President Trump another pick that could shift the court’s ideological balance more sharply to the right.

The ruling, in Janus v. AFSCME, overturns a precedent from the 1970s known as Abood which had held that dissenting public-sector workers could be exempted from funding unions’ explicitly political activities but could be forced to pay so-called agency fees that fund contract negotiations and other traditional labor activities.

The court’s four liberal justices dissented in an opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan. She criticized the majority for overruling Abood with “little regard” for the court’s usual deference to precedent, and said the court is inappropriately weighing in on whether agency fees should be required, an issue currently being debated in the states.

“Judicial disruption does not get any greater than what the Court does today,” Kagan wrote.

Plaintiff Mark Janus and others had argued that Abood should be overturned because even traditional labor activities, like contracts and layoff policies, are political when they affect taxpayer dollars and public policy.

Janus, a child support specialist from Illinois, praised the ruling.

After waiting in the courtroom to hear it, he described the decision as “a big sigh of relief, actually, that we now have a finished conclusion to this long road.”

“We’re doing this for worker rights across the country, the 5 million public-sector workers that now have the opportunity to decide on their own [whether or not to join a union],” Janus told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Unions, for their part, slammed the decision as elevating the privilege of conservative donors who have funded Janus and similar lawsuits over the rights of working people.

“Strong unions create strong communities. We will continue fighting, caring, showing up and voting, to make possible what is impossible for individuals acting alone,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in a .

In overturning Abood, the court rejected arguments that it struck a balance between protecting dissenters’ First Amendment rights and maintaining “labor peace” while preventing “free riders” from benefiting from union-negotiated contracts without helping pay for them.

Alito in the majority opinion extensively discusses the First Amendment issue, particularly the issues on which dissenting members may disagree with their unions, including a number of education policies.

Specifically, he lists teacher tenure and transfer policies, merit pay, and evaluations as areas that could be negotiated in collective bargaining that are “of great public importance.”

Critics of how some of these policies play out in the classroom say teachers unions sometimes protect the interests of their adult members over the educational needs of students. Lawsuits brought in several statesĚýby the Partnership for Educational Justice argue that some of these union-negotiated protections, specifically tenure and seniority-based layoffs, directly harm low-income students of color by keeping poor-performing teachers in the classroom, denying students their right to an adequate public education.

The ruling has the potential to greatly diminish the monetary and political influence of unions, a key ally to Democrats.

President Donald Trump noted that fact in a Tweet praising the ruling and calling it a “Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!”

Teachers unions could be particularly hard-hit, Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said in a release.

“Losing agency fees won’t kill teachers unions, as the recent teachers’ strikes in non-agency-fee states prove, but it could permanently weaken one of the nation’s largest interest groups,” he added.

Alito’s decision goes farther than some had expected, clarifying that dissenting employees cannot be forced to opt out of union membership as they are now, following what those workers say are sometimes overly burdensome requirements for doing so.

“Unless employees clearly and affirmatively consent before any money is taken from them, this [First Amendment] standard cannot be met,” he wrote.

Both Alito and Kagan acknowledged the ruling’s potential to disrupt unions’ usual functions and relationships with employers.

The loss of payments from non-members “may cause unions to experience unpleasant costs in the short term, and may require unions to make adjustments in order to attract and retain members,” Alito wrote.

But he had little patience for those arguments, when compared to what are now illegal forced dues payments.

“We must weigh these disadvantages against the considerable windfall that unions have received under Abood for the past 41 years. It is hard to estimate how many billions of dollars have been taken from nonmembers and transferred to public-sector unions in violation of the First Amendment,” he wrote.

Kagan, meanwhile, noted that the decision upsets state law in 20 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, requiring rewrites of those statutes and renegotiation of thousands of contracts.

New York City alone has agency fees in 144 contracts with 97 public-sector unions, she notes.

“Across the country, the relationships of public employees and employers will alter in both predictable and wholly unexpected ways,” she warned.

In New York City, teachers sign two cards, one that makes them union members and another that authorizes the city to automatically deduct dues, United Federation of Teachers officials said on a call with reporters Wednesday.

Educators may revoke their membership at any time. New York law allows unions to set the standards for opting out of the automatic dues payments. UFT requires employees to notify the city in writing between June 15 and June 30 if they don’t consent to the automatic deduction and want the part of their dues returned to them that they could claim pre-Janus, the portion that covers political activities, union officials said.

From those agency-only fee-payers, UFT could lose as much as $1.5 million in dues in the coming year, out of its $185 million budget, representatives said. That doesn’t include current members who pay full dues but may choose to stop doing so after the Janus decision.

A number of pending cases challenged the requirement in many states that those who want to leave the union explicitly opt out of doing so, rather than mandating that all employees who want to be union members affirmatively join.

One of those, Yohn v. California Teachers Association, challenges California’s rules that require teachers who want to only pay agency fees to affirmatively opt out of the union, rather than requiring teachers who want to join the CTA to opt in.

“We had hoped that the court would go beyond the narrow question and address the consent issue that’s implicated in these opt-out rules … There was no better than a 50-50 chance that would happen, and I think that helps move things forward on the ground without a lot of needless litigation,” Terry Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. The center brought the Yohn case.

Lawyers will ask California for a summary judgment in Yohn’s favor based on the Janus ruling, Pell said.

“Tłóąđre’s really nothing else to litigate,” he added.

Disclosure: Campbell Brown founded the Partnership for Educational Justice. She co-founded ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ and sits on its board of directors. She played no part in the reporting or editing of this story. Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to PEJ and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Any day now the U.S. Supreme Court will hand down a decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which will determine whether public sector unions can continue to charge representation fees to non-members in the 22 states that allow the practice.

The stakes are high for the nation’s largest union — the National Education Association — and NEA’s membership numbers for 2017 illustrate why. The union will immediately lose revenue from the estimated 100,000 fee-payers it represents. It will also lose dues money from those who are currently members, but won’t be once they realize they no longer need to pay anything to the union.

NEA had 2,612,027 active members working in the public school system in 2017 — an increase of 0.7 percent from the year before — plus an additional 370,000 retired and student members. The modest overall growth disguises the differences between trends in the agency fee states and the right-to-work states.

In states where NEA represents fee-payers, the union had 29,317 more members. In right-to-work states, it had 12,268 fewer members.

I culled the figures from the NEA Secretary-Treasurer/Independent Auditors 2018 Financial Reports and constructed a table, which provides both the total and active membership for each state affiliate. Along with the numbers are the one-year and five-year changes in those figures.

Two states, New York and California, accounted for more than 18,000 new active members. Other affiliates did not fare nearly as well.

Ten affiliates lost 4 percent or more of their active members in a single year. They were:

Arkansas, down 7.2%

Michigan, down 4.5%

North Carolina, down 8.2%

Oklahoma, down 4.7%

South Carolina, down 4.2%

Tennessee, down 7.7%

Texas, down 6.2%

West Virginia, down 5.6%

Wisconsin, down 4.9%

Utah School Employees Association, down 7.8%

All of these are right-to-work states.

A notable exception was Florida, which allows public sector unions to act as exclusive collective bargaining agents, but does not permit the levying of representation fees. Florida Education Association membership fluctuates annually, but it gained almost 4,000 new members last year, and its active membership is virtually the same as it was five years ago.

Everyone in the education and labor fields is speculating about the effect of Janus on union membership numbers. We simply can’t say with any authority how drastic the losses will be. Will there be a steady and uninterrupted decline, as we have seen in Wisconsin and Michigan, or will membership reach a plateau and stay there, as seems to be the case in Florida?

It is something we will have to track for a long time, along with changes in the relative strengths of one union to another, increases in dues to compensate for fewer members, possible union mergers, and the entry of newly formed unions into the public sector.

Understandably the public’s focus is on changes in political power, but unions will be faced with internal reforms and interactions with other labor organizations that may ultimately have greater consequences for their operations than agency fees ever did.

The poll, which found 62 percent of respondents saying workers should be allowed to stop paying dues if they choose and 33 percent saying fees should still be mandatory, was conducted for the nonprofit by , a polling firm used by many Republican organizations.

Across race, gender, and age, the majority of respondents favored choice in union fees. But this differed notably when it came to political party. While 76 percent of Republicans said workers should be able to opt out of fees, Democratic respondents were split evenly, with 48 percent against mandatory dues and 47 percent in favor.

Pollsters also asked whether respondents or members of their households were part of a union. Among those who said yes, a majority, 52 percent, supported giving workers a choice in paying union dues.

“It comes down to the idea that in order to get a job, keep a job, be employed, it shouldn’t cost you money to do that,” said Micah Roberts, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies.

The Janus case hinges on the argument that it is a violation of First Amendment rights to require employees to pay fees to a union. Although public-sector union members can opt out of paying dues that support a union’s political activities, they are still required to pay agency fees that cover collective bargaining and other shared employment benefits.

The plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, Illinois state worker Mark Janus, contends that for public-sector unions, even activities like contract negotiations are political in nature. Supporters of mandatory dues argue that it’s only fair for all workers who reap the benefits of a union to help fund them.

The Supreme Court could rule on the case as early as Thursday morning or possibly Monday morning, when its term typically ends. (ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ has published an array of articles, analyses, and commentaries about the case and its possible ramifications — “Understanding Janus: 13 Ways the Pivotal Supreme Court Case Could Change the Finances, Membership, and Politics of America’s Teachers Unions.”)

Just because respondents in this latest poll don’t support mandatory fees doesn’t mean they don’t favor unions. Ěý from several different organizations has found that a majority of Americans support labor unions. A recent Educators for Excellence reported that 85 percent of teachers view unions as essential. But while 82 percent said they would opt into their union if not automatically enrolled, about 60 percent of non-members said they would opt out of paying their dues if given the choice.

The Public Opinion Strategies poll included a sample of 800 registered voters contacted by landline and cellphone between June 8 and 14. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.46 percent.

This is how the question was posed to respondents: “Currently government workers in many states, including teachers, must pay dues to a labor union as a requirement of their employment whether they choose to participate in the union or not. However, the Supreme Court will soon decide if these employees may stop paying dues. Do you believe that government workers should be required to pay union dues to represent them — or — should be allowed to stop paying union dues if they choose?” For further clarity on what was asked, and who responded to the poll, ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ has published a comprehensive

When it came to generational differences, Gen Xers had the lowest percentage of respondents agreeing that dues should be mandatory, at 28 percent, while Baby Boomers had the highest support, at 38 percent. Millennials sat in the middle, at 33 percent.

Looking at race, African Americans were the most likely to support mandatory dues, at 40 percent, while Hispanics were the least likely, at 22 percent. White respondents fell between these two points, with 32 percent favoring the dues.

Responses overall were identical by gender, with 33 percent of males and 33 percent of females supporting the fees and 62 percent of men and 63 percent of women opposing them. Five percent of men and 5 percent of women said they didn’t know or refused to answer.

Karen Nussle, president of Conservative Leaders for Education, said she was surprised by the consistency in responses the poll found across demographics.

“Workers expect to have choices, especially when it comes to their money,” Nussle said. “That’s what people are expressing in the polls.”

Although past polling has found that the majority of Americans support unions, a recent poll released in June from found an even split among respondents as to whether or not fees should be mandatory, with about 45 percent saying yes and 45 percent saying no. This poll question was phrased differently: “Labor unions negotiate the wages and benefits for all workers covered by union contracts. In some states, workers covered by union contracts are required to pay at least some union dues, even if they choose not to be full union members. However, in other states workers can decide for themselves whether or not to pay union dues. Which is closer to your view? All workers covered by union contracts should pay at least some union dues, or each worker covered by a union contract should be allowed to decide for themselves whether or not to pay dues?”

A 2017 that asked respondents about whether teachers should be required to pay fees even if they don’t join a union found that 44 percent said no and 33 percent said yes.

Not all states require that people covered by union contracts pay fees. Currently 28 states are right-to-work states, meaning workers get to make the decision to join a union. But for the 22 states that are not right-to-work —Ěýincluding states like New York and California where labor unions wield significant influence —Ěýa ruling in favor of the plaintiff Mark Janus could dramatically affect them.

According to documents obtained by ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, the National Education Association plans to cut its budget by $50 million in anticipation of a ruling not in its favor, and it projects a member loss of 300,000.

“Tłóąđ corporate special interests behind this case are dead set on eliminating the rights and freedoms of working people to organize, to negotiate collectively and to have any voice in working to better their lives,” said Lily Eskelsen GarcĂ­a, president of the National Education Association, about the Janus case.

More information on today’s poll:

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Updated Disclosure: The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation provides financial support to Conservative Leaders For Education and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

For the latest news and analysis of the Janus case, sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s newsletter.

Janus v. the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. It’s the case that had the education community fixated on the Supreme Court for months, wondering how a ruling for the plaintiff could impact the nation’s teachers unions.

It arrived on the last day of the court’s 2017 session with a 5-4 decision finding for Mark Janus, an Illinois state worker who argued that it violates the First Amendment to require public-sector employees to pay union dues — even to help fund collective bargaining and other shared benefits — when they disagree with their union’s positions.

In another potential game-changer, the majority also ruled that members now have to affirmatively opt into the union, unlike past practice where dissenting members were required to opt out.

We’ve been tracking the case for the better part of a year now and have published more than a dozen primers on the key issues involved — and the potential implications for public employees.

Watch — Understanding Janus in 100 seconds:

Now that the long-awaited ruling is in (read the full decision), here areĚý14 important things to consider as the focus shifts from speculation to understanding of Janus’sĚýconsequences:

1. The Plaintiff — “Korman: Mark Janus Never Sued Anyone, So How Did He Become the Face of the Year’s Biggest Court Case Involving Unions?” Read the full analysis.

2. The Facts — “Janus v. AFSCME: 5 Things to Know About the Latest Union Dues Case Headed to the High Court.” Read the full analysis.

3. The Arguments — “Supreme Court Transcript: Read Monday’s Complete Janus v. AFSCME Arguments at the High Court.” Read the full transcript.

4. The Counterpoint — “A˛Ô˛šąô˛â˛őžą˛ő: Teachers Unions Will Argue in Court That ‘Agency Fees’ Don’t Fund Political Activities. But They’re Saying Something Different to Members.” Read the full report.

5. The New Justice — “What SCOTUS Nominee Neil Gorsuch’s Past Rulings on Education Cases Could Mean on the High Court.” Read the full analysis.

6. The Labor Landscape — “Labor in the Age of Janus: 6 Things to Keep in Mind About American Unions on the Eve of a Pivotal Supreme Court Ruling.” Read the full report.

7. Public Opinion — “Exclusive: Poll Shows Nearly Two-Thirds of Americans Would Support Supreme Court Striking Down Mandatory Union Dues in Janus Case; Majority of Union Households Agree.” Read the complete findings.

8. The Political Stakes — “Bradford: Could the Supreme Court’s New Union Dues Case Liberate Reform-Minded Democrats to Do What’s Right for Kids?” Read the full column.

9. The Financial Stakes — “Exclusive: Ahead of a Key Supreme Court Decision, America’s Largest Teachers Union Slashes Budget by $50 Million, Projects That 300,000 Members May Leave.” Read the full report.

10. The Membership Stakes — “A˛Ô˛šąô˛â˛őžą˛ő: How Will a Janus Ruling Impact Teachers and Unions in Each State? Data & Interactive Maps Tell the Story.” Read the full analysis.

11. Is the Future of Labor Local? — â€Ŕá´Ú Janus Ruling Means Teachers No Longer Have to Join Unions, Will Breaking Away From State and National Affiliates Be a Way to Save Local Membership?” Read the full article.

12. Will Unions Have to Compete for Members? — “A˛Ô˛šąô˛â˛őžą˛ő: Janus Ruling Could Force Unions to Compete for Members.” Read the full analysis.

13. After Union Dues, a Fight Over Collective Bargaining? — “It’s Not Just Union Dues, It’s Collective Bargaining: Looking to States That Banned Them as Post-Janus Crystal Ball.” Read the full analysis.

14. After Janus, the Next Court Case — “A´ÚłŮąđ°ů Janus, Another Key Lawsuit Targeting Unions: How California’s Yohn Case Targets Opt-Out Rules.” Read the full report.

Go Deeper: For the latest news and analysis of the Janus case, sign up for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ’s newsletter.