America’s Future Foundation: Public-Sector Union Issues
Public-sector unions are supposed to protect and benefit workers. But what happens when workers are actually harmed by unions?
The Fairness Center is a nonprofit public interest law firm offering free legal services to those hurt by public sector union officials.
The firm represents clients in the court of law and court of public opinion. Listen as AFF-Philly was joined by Conner Drigotas, director of communications and outreach for the firm. Conner shares some of the Fairness Center’s recent client stories, including:
Trometter v. National Education Association
This audio was recorded and originally published by the America’s Future Foundation
My name is Conner Drigotas, I am here as the Director of Communications and Outreach of a nonprofit public interest law firm called the Fairness Center. Our job is to protect those who have been hurt by public-sector union officials.
Which can mean a great many things, but before I talk about what it is exactly that we do, I want you all to know is that as a 501c3 nonprofit we are able to help every single client that we have, for free. Because we are 100% donor supported people come to us for help and we are able to offer legal help without taking a single penny from our clients.
Now I am not an attorney, my job is to tell our clients stories, I get to smile more than our attorneys’ and I get to travel around the state talking to folks like you about how we help people win, yes, in the court of law, but also how we help our clients win in the court of public opinion.
What I would like to do is spend some time telling you about three of our clients – a nurse, a group of firefighters, and a teacher, each of whom was hurt by public sector union officials, and we were able to be there for them.
We are a national organization, but we have a state focus. Right now, we are focused on Pennsylvania and Connecticut – and there are numerous potential clients who need what we do. The first story I want to tell you is about a nurse in Connecticut named Cheryl.
Cheryl is an accomplished nurse, she works as a nurse practitioner which means she has a master’s degree in providing care. She can write prescriptions, like a doctor she can have her own patients and, as if that wasn’t challenging enough, Cheryl also chose to work in the corrections system in Connecticut providing care to prisoners. So instead of working out of a family doctor’s office, she goes to prison every day to take care of patients.
Because it is a state prison, that also means that she is a government employee. And because her bargaining unit is represented by a public-sector union, she is also forced to accept the union’s representation.
Now back in 2015 Cheryl had reconnected with her church and as she went through the very personal process of evaluating what parts of her life fit with her world view, she recognized that the union who represented her at work was engaged in political activity and promoted positions that ran counter to her beliefs.
Meanwhile, she was paying money to this public-sector union out of every single one of her paychecks. She wanted to make sure her rights and beliefs were being respected – so she did something about it. She picked up a copy of the collective bargaining agreement and she learned that she could withdraw her support from the union. She would still have to accept their representation, which she did not want, but she could take her dues money and send it to a charity instead.
Wonderful! Cheryl thought. So, she submitted a letter asking for her money to be diverted from the union to a charity. That should have been the end of this story. Instead, the union refused to even acknowledge her wishes.
By the time Cheryl reached out to our legal team at the Fairness Center she had been unsuccessful in getting the union to respect her rights for three years.
Our legal team was able to take a look at her situation and help her file a lawsuit demanding that the union stop violating Cheryl’s rights.
From when Cheryl filed the lawsuit after three years of trying to get the union to listen to her to when the case ended was three months. She had been trying to fight this on her own for three years and in three months the Fairness Center lawyers got the union to give her every penny of her money back – with interest!
But for Cheryl and many other Fairness Center clients, the money is just a part of the problem. This is equally about principles. And respect for people’s rights. Its about fairness and decency.
A lot of our clients find us in that moment of need – We actually represent more than just individuals – we represent groups of people when there is a need. I told you I was going to tell you about some firefighters.
I like getting to talk about firefighters. They have a cool job and they love what they do. One of the members of the local firefighter’s union our legal team represents told me that firefighters love being the only government service that will show up in less than four minutes, will do the job, and then leaves without making you do any paperwork. These guys have a wonderful sense of humor – even when things are at their worst. And unfortunately, these firefighters found us when things were at their worst.
Back in 2016 a Local union of firefighters in New Haven Connecticut voted to resign membership in their state union. The state union was expensive, and they didn’t feel they were getting much for the between 20 and 30 thousand dollars per year they were paying in dues. So, the board took the vote, it was unanimous, and they told the state union they were leaving.
The problem was – more than two years later – the state union was still refusing to acknowledge their disaffiliation and demanding more than $50,000 from the firefighters. Things were starting to get pretty ugly before we stepped in – the firefighters had been put into collections by their own union, the collections agency was calling firefighters’ elderly parents. No part of this was pretty. These firefighters should have been fighting fires and instead they were stuck fighting union bureaucrats.
The Fairness Center’s attorneys have a very straightforward mission – to protect those hurt by public-sector union officials. That meant protecting these firefighters from any further harm by these state union officials, and also undoing the harm that had been done to these guys so far.
We have some great attorneys who I enjoy working with both because they are good people and because they are good lawyers. It took nearly two years of legal work to get the job done. In the meantime, I was able to bolster the legal team’s case via radio, television, articles, op eds, letters to the editor, videos, and social media to make sure that their story was being told. While not everyone in Connecticut could tell you the details about Local 825 v the UPFFA – everyone who has heard of the case got firefighters’ side of the story.
That can be hard to do when you’re in a legal battle versus a union. The Fairness Center’s clients often go up against state and international unions with millions at their disposal. People don’t always feel they have the ammunition to fight them alone. It doesn’t make sense to hire a lawyer who charges $400 an hour to recover $200 in dues, or to protect your rights which may not have a financial value but are, they might tell you, more valuable than money. We step in to protect the little guy and make sure their rights are being protected and it is vital that we can do it for free.
And it can be fun too! For all the complicated legal things our attorneys handle, there can also be a lot of excitement. I think one interesting part of my work at the Fairness Center is telling people like you the sometimes-crazy stories of how our clients find themselves in need of help. So, before I wrap up I’ll share one of those with you.
How many of you vote? Most of you, almost all of you.
How many of you get annoying political mailers? All of you, every one of us gets hundreds of mailers every campaign season. And every one of those letters has a legal requirement that it says who paid for that mail to be sent, right? Everyone has seen that paid for by so and so…
At the Fairness Center we represented a client, Ms. Mary Trometter who, like the rest of us, received a lot of mail during the campaign for governor back in 2014 – and one day she went to the mailbox, and she found a letter addressed to her husband and in that letter it read “Please join Mary in voting for Tom Wolf for Governor on November fourth.”
Now Mary, did a hard-double take – because two problems were immediately apparent to her. First, she did not plan on voting for Tom Wolf for Governor, meaning that the information provided was false and, second, she noticed that the mailer was sent by her union – an organization that is legally barred in Pennsylvania from supporting a candidate or campaign.
Well Mary, she looked at that letter and she ripped it in half, right in two pieces top to bottom and she tossed it in the trashcan and walked away. BUT. As she was walking away she suddenly had a thought in her mind. The idea occurred to her that maybe she should stand up and do something.
Mary stopped, she turned around, and she went right back to that trash can and took the two halves of the paper out of the trash – she got her scotch tape and put the pieces back together and made a decision to fight back.
She came to the Fairness Center for help protecting those rights and our attorneys were able to say, yes, we can help, and yes, we can help you for free. Our legal staff is here to protect your rights in the court of law. Our whole team is here to make this right.
As a matter of constitutional rights, public employees should have the right to join and leave the union as best suits them. Even if you agree with everything that organization says, you should be able to support or leave that organization of your own free will.
If your local grocery store raised its prices by 50% and got rid of your favorite foods, you would go to another grocery store. If your union raised its dues and refused to fight for the issues you believe in, current law would force you to accept the unions representation or lose your job. Our public employees have no choice.
When I say public employees, I mean our teachers, our nurses, our firefighters and police officers. When they accept these jobs, they are being forced into accepting representation that in many cases they neither want nor need. They deserve better.
Before I go, I want to tell you about just one more situation unfolding across Pennsylvania involving something called maintenance of membership. If you haven’t heard of it, maintenance of membership is a contract provision that allows unions to trap members from leaving. In fact, they can prevent employees from ending their union membership for years at a time, until the last few days of a collective bargaining agreement. On its face, this is an unfair practice.
At the Fairness Center, we believe the law affords to all individuals the right to join a union. It is an intensely personal choice. But, as many of our clients would tell you, you should also be free to leave the union if it does not represent your beliefs or offer you the quality of representation you deserve.
What I wanted to mention is another example of how the Fairness Center’s clients are making a difference. Since the Fall of 2018, we have filed eight lawsuits to help clients trapped in their unions. And it is working, even though many of our clients’ cases don’t reach the merits. But unions have been dropping their practices as a result of their cases. So far, the result has been freeing more than 22,500 people in Pennsylvania alone from these restrictive policies.
But that’s the mission. That is why we exist. We help protect those who have been hurt by public sector union officials, and we will be there when those issues arise. This is about our clients, and everyone’s ability to do what is right for their families.
Whether its Cheryl asking for her rights to be respected, or the firefighters of New Haven who wanted to leave a broken state union, we are here for all of our clients: teachers, firefighters, nurses – all public employees, when we are needed.
It is a pleasure to work with our clients and help protect their constitutional rights, and it’s a pleasure to spend some time with your group. Thank you for caring about the future of this state, and this country, and for putting the rights of people first. Thank you so much for having me today
