The Illinois Policy Institute, its partner the Liberty Justice Center, and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation filed a lawsuit in 2015 on behalf of Mark Janus, who was an Illinois state employee. The resulting case — Janus vs. AFSMCE — challenged the constitutionality of forcing government employees to financially support public sector unions against their will. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually took up the case and in June 2018 ruled that all local, state and federal government employees have a First Amendment right not to pay dues or fees to a labor union. This includes public school teachers, state employees, police officers, firefighters and other local government workers.
Policy experts and scholars are debating the Janus ruling’s impact. One complicating factor is right-to-work laws, which are state laws that prohibit unions from forcing workers to pay dues. At the time of the decision, 28 states had such laws for public sector workers, so the court’s ruling only impacted government employees in 22 states.[*]
Prior to the Janus decision, unionized public employees in states without right-to-work laws had to pay the union in their workplace. They technically had two options: 1) be an official union member and pay full dues, or 2) decline membership but still pay the union a so-called agency fee. These fees are typically not much less than a union’s full dues, which reduces the incentive for workers to opt out of membership.
After the Janus decision, the public employees who had already declined union membership and were paying only agency fees were immediately relieved of having to financially support their union. Existing union members and newly hired employees, meanwhile, now faced a different set of options: 1) be an official union member and pay full dues, or 2) decline membership and pay nothing.
The research described in this report aims to estimate how many potential public sector union members have declined membership since the Janus decision. This includes both the preexisting agency-fee payers and workers who declined membership after the Janus decision changed their set of options about financially supporting the union in their workplace.
There is a broad divide of opinions about the potential impact of Janus. Some claim it will devastate government unions, while others claim it will have only a minimal effect, at most. Others believe it will rejuvenate public sector unions and ultimately make them stronger. Public sector labor unions, which are the most immediately affected by the ruling, continue to decry the decision but also tend to claim its effects are trivial.
This report aims to inform that debate. It presents new data about the impact of the Janus decision. These statistics are more accurate and comprehensive than the data commonly used to assess Janus’ impact. They result from thousands of public records requests sent to hundreds of public entities across nearly two dozen states.
These data show clearly that the Janus decision has had a significant effect on public sector unions. A little more than one in five government workers have exercised their right to resign fully from their unions since the Janus ruling. Newly hired local and state government employees also appear to be declining union membership at a similar rate. The most immediate and significant effect of this is on public sector union dues revenues, which we estimate are lower by $720 million annually based on the estimated 1.2 million government employees who have resigned or declined union membership.
[*] For purposes of this analysis, states which had a right-to-work law on the books in June 2018 were considered right-to-work states and not directly affected by the Janus decision. Missouri passed a right-to-work law and other labor reforms in 2017. Some elements of these were later limited, suspended or repealed by court decisions and ballot initiatives. Nevertheless, these reforms significantly impacted public sector union membership in Missouri, which complicates measuring the impact of Janus in the state. For these reasons, Missouri is not included in our calculations.