Louis Freedberg | EdSource
“In one of the last acts of the current term, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition from plaintiffs in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association to rehear the case that the court had already ruled on in a 4-4-opinion in March.
The lawsuit sought to eliminate ‘agency fees’ that require teachers to pay a portion of union dues. If the plaintiffs – Rebecca Friedrichs and nine other California teachers – had won, it could have inflicted a potentially devastating financial blow against the CTA, and by extension all public employee unions.
The split opinion, which came about as a result of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, represented a major victory for the CTA and public employee unions. It kept the court’s earlier decision, requiring mandatory fees, intact.”