The Liberty Justice Center filed a class action lawsuit on July 23, 2019, against AFSCME District Council 37 seeking a refund of illegal union fees plaintiff Scott Solomon and other city employees paid from July 23, 2016, through June 27, 2018.
If successful, approximately 7,000 New York City government employees who were not union members but paid fees to AFSCME could recoup as much as $7 million in illegal union fees they paid to the union between 2016-2018. However, each of these workers and many others have paid much more in illegal union fees over the course of their public service careers.
For decades, government workers in New York and 21 other states were required to pay union fees as a condition of employment. It did not matter if workers were not union members or did not support the unions’ positions on policies and politics; politicians in New York and elsewhere had granted government unions the power to exclusively represent public sector workers, and to deduct mandatory union fees from their paychecks. But in 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that it is a violation of public employees’ First Amendment rights to require them to fund government unions as a condition of working for the government.
The lawsuit was filed on Scott Solomon’s behalf by attorneys from the Liberty Justice Center and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Jeffrey M. Schwab is a Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, where he litigates cases to protect the rights to free speech, economic liberty, private property and other Constitutional rights in both federal and state courts across the country.