Dunleavy's anti-union crusade fails again; AG plans appeal to U.S. Supreme Court
Gov. Mike Dunleavy now has his third attorney general promoting the anti-union crusade that Alaska courts and many others across the nation say is founded on a faulty reading of a U.S. Supreme Court case.
The cost over the past four years with contract lawyers and staff time has surely topped $1 million, as it was pushing $700,000 two-and-a-half years ago.
What I wrote here four years ago about Dunleavy and his first attorney general, Kevin Clarkson, still holds true with AG No, 3. Their dream is ”to get this case out of the state courts and into the federal courts as soon as possible, hoping that it will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The Alaska Supreme Court unanimously rejected all the claims by the Dunleavy administration Friday in a clear and convincing manner, but Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor immediately signaled plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Anti-union zealotry and the belief that the Supreme Court might be receptive to more anti-union claims drives this crusade, not a belief that the state courts are wrong. Here is the Alaska Supreme Court ruling.
Taylor claimed it was no surprise that he lost in the Alaska Supreme Court, but wants the U.S. Supreme Court to come to the rescue.
It’s not clear that he will get his wish because the U.S. Supreme Court has refused multiple cases pushing arguments similar to those made by Dunleavy and his legal generals.
Taylor had his name on some of the early legal documents for Clarkson’s case, which is now the Dunleavy-Taylor campaign, based on the proposition that employees who voluntarily join a union and voluntarily pay union dues to the union are not acting voluntarily.
The Dunleavy administration has lost time after time with its attempt to say voluntary means involuntary. Now the Alaska Supreme Court has also found that the state violated union contracts and multiple state laws.
The big picture is that Dunleavy and his AGs, reflecting the wishes of right-wing think tanks Outside, want to expand the reach of the so-called Janus case and weaken labor unions.
In the 2018 Janus case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that those who are not union members can’t be required to pay an “agency fee” as a substitute for union dues. Dunleavy and Clarkson and now Taylor claim to know that the Supreme Court really wanted to make a broader ruling, so that union members can stop paying dues whenever they wanted, instead of being able to do so once a year, which is the practice in the Alaska government.
The Dunleavy administration admitted in court that it consulted with right-wing think tanks Outside, but not with the Alaska State Employees Association when it started the anti-union crusade in 2019.
It was a coordinated effort. On the same day that Carkson sent his legal opinion to Dunleavy, Kelly Tshibaka, then the administration commissioner, sent an email to state employees saying the state would soon refuse to deduct union dues unless the workers signed new forms the state would create. Tshibaka did not contact ASEA.
The Dunleavy administration sued ASEA a month later, claiming that because of the Janus ruling, the state had to abandon the dues collection procedures in the state labor contract.
Dunleavy, Clarkson and Tshibaka wanted employees to sign documents claiming workers knew they were waiving their “First Amendment right not to pay union dues and fees” by agreeing to pay union dues.
Dunleavy said he wanted “to ensure state employees’ free speech rights are protected.”
The Dunleavy administration admitted in court that it did not consult with ASEA about any of this, but it did consult with the same Outside right-wing think tanks that consulted with Clarkson before he formed his legal opinion.
“The state created a ‘Cease Union Dues Deduction’ form and emailed it to twelve ASEA members who had contacted the state in response to Commissioner Tshibaka’s emails. Some of them, union members who had paid dues to ASEA through payroll deductions and had signed dues authorization forms that included the one-year commitment and the ten-day revocation period, requested that the state stop deducting union dues from their paychecks,” the Supreme Court ruling said.
In February 2021, Anchorage Superior Court Judge Gregory Miller ruled against the state and rejected the Dunleavy administration assertion that the First Amendment rights of workers had been violated by voluntarily paying union dues. The Alaska Supreme Court has now upheld that ruling.
The court rejected the Dunleavy claims that it showed no “animus” toward unions.
“But we see abundant evidence of anti-union animus,” the Alaska Supreme Court said.
“The state espoused its sweeping interpretation of Janus and began unilaterally changing dues deduction procedures only after a change in administration; the new administration consulted with Outside special interest groups but did not consult or negotiate with ASEA, with which it had a collective bargaining agreement; the state emailed all employees represented by ASEA to inform them (incorrectly) about their First Amendment rights and about union members (fictitious) rights to immediately stop payroll dues deductions, again without first consulting ASEA: the state made changes only to dues deduction procedures, not to other union-related employee payroll deductions; and the state actually stopped collecting dues from ASEA members outside their contractual revocation windows and did not inform ASEA.”
This losing crusade should have ended when Clarkson texted himself out of a job. But Dunleavy has continued under the guise of “freedom,” blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars that could have been spent to help Alaskans.
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