The Most Important Supreme Court Case

Executive orders by Governors Rod Blagojevich (2003) and Pat Quinn (2009) turned 20,000 self-employed home-care workers into dues paying Services Employees International Union (SEIU) members. The Supreme Court will weigh in on this power grab which could be the most important case this term. The Wall Street Journal points out here:

Ten states have similar arrangements, which have proliferated as union membership has fallen to 6.6% of the private workforce. As fewer workers voluntarily join unions, the unions have relied ever more on state coercion. There were 1.9 million U.S. home-care workers in 2010, with that number expected to reach over three million by 2020. Some 475,000 are unionized.

The Illinois legal defense is that there is a state interest in unionization based on the “labor peace” doctrine that goes back to the earliest days of the union movement. There may have been such a government interest when, say, a railroad strike threatened nationwide commerce in the early 1900s. But the Cato Institute and National Federation of Independent Business argue persuasively in an amicus brief that the “labor peace” rationale does not trump First Amendment rights. And it hardly applies to home-care workers who operate independently or in small groups with no bearing on statewide commerce.

In Knox v. SEIU in 2012, the Justices ruled that forced unionization deserves a high level of First Amendment scrutiny. “Mandatory associations are permissible only when they serve a ‘compelling state interes[t] . . . that cannot be achieved through means significantly less restrictive of associational freedoms.'” Let’s hope the High Court follows this logic to find Illinois’s forced unionization unconstitutional.

E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

Preparing your investments and family for when disaster strikes.

E.J. Smith is the Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH, where he completed course-work in Practical and Defensive Handgun, Conceal Carry Pistol, Shotguns, Precision Scope Rifle and Kidnapping Prevention. E.J. plays a Yamaha Recording Custom drum set with Zilldjian cymbals. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zilldjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@youngresearch.com. Sign up here to receive all the best content from Richardcyoung.com each week.