Michigan Justices Drill UAW Attorney

Michigan Supreme Court justices closely question a United Auto Workers (UAW) labor attorney’s challenge to the Right to Work Law.   Chad Livengood has the story in The Detroit News.

Republican-backed Supreme Court justices drilled a labor union attorney during a hearing Tuesday over whether Michigan’s two-year-old right-to-work law applies to state workers.

In challenging the landmark labor law, an attorney for the United Auto Workers argued before the high court Tuesday that the Michigan Civil Service Commission should still have the power to force state employees to pay a union a fee to maintain collective bargaining agreements.

“It’s pretty clear that the framers … thought that the commission would regulate collective bargaining,†UAW attorney Bill Wertheimer said.

Shortly before the right-to-work law took effect in March 2013, the UAW sued to challenge whether the law applies to some 35,000 state workers whose wages and working conditions are set by the constitutionally autonomous Civil Service Commission.

But justices on the high court’s 5-2 conservative majority questioned whether the commission ever had authority under the 1963 state constitution to regulate collective bargaining and conditions of employment, such as compulsory union fees.

Chief Justice Robert Young Jr. and Justice Brian Zahra both noted there were not established public-sector unions representing state employees in 1963. Unions did not take root in state government until the 1980s, according to an attorney for the Michigan Chamber of Commerce.

“They certainly didn’t envision public unions and they didn’t envision agency fees,†Zahra said of the 1963 constitutional framers.

UAW attorneys contend the Civil Service Commission should have the “exclusive authority†to continue collecting agency fees from union-eligible employees in future contracts — a condition of employment that the Republican-controlled Legislature sought to ban through the right-to-work law.

The Michigan Court of Appeals sided with Gov. Rick Snyder and lawmakers, ruling that the law does apply to workers covered by the Civil Service Commission’s jurisdiction.