Air Line Pilots Association v. Robert A. Miller, et al. (523 U.S. 866)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided May 26, 1998 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 523 U.S. 866 · 118 S. Ct. 1761
- Decided
- May 26, 1998
- Term
- October Term 1997
- Vote
- 7–2
- Majority author
- Justice Ginsburg
- Issue area
- Unions
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Ginsburg delivered the opinion of the Court. An “agency-shop” arrangement permits a union, obliged to act on behalf of all employees in the bargaining unit, to charge nonunion workers their fair share of the costs of the representation. The purposes for which a union may spend the “agency fee” paid by nonmembers, however, are circumscribed by the First Amendment (when public employers are involved) and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or Railway Labor Act (RLA) (when private employers subject to their provisions are involved). In Teachers v. Hudson, 475 U. S. 292 (1986), we held that the First Amendment requires public-employee unions to accord workers who object to the agency fee “a reasonably prompt opportunity to challenge the amount of the fee before an impartial decision-maker.” Id., at 310. Petitioner Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA or Union), a private-sector labor organization covered by the RLA, acknowledges that it is bound by Hudson. ALPA endeavored to comply with Hudson’s “impartial decisionmaker” requirement by referring all fee disputes to a neutral arbitrator. In the action now before us, nonunion pilots challenged the agency fee collected by the Union in 1992. ALPA urged that the challengers must exhaust the arbitration process before pursuing judicial remedies. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that the pilots…
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