United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 15-1433
KATHLEEN D'AGOSTINO; DENISE BOIAN; JEAN M. DEMERS; LAURIE SMITH;
KELLY WINSHIP; DENISE FARLEY; STEPHANIE KOZLOWSKI-HECK; LESLIE
MARCYONIAK; ELIZABETH MONGEON,
Plaintiffs, Appellants,
v.
CHARLIE BAKER, in his official capacity as Governor of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts; THOMAS L. WEBER, in his official
capacity as Director of the Department of Early Education and
Care; SERVICE EMPLOYEES INTERNATIONAL UNION, LOCAL 509,
Defendants, Appellees.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
[Hon. Leo T. Sorokin, U.S. District Judge]
Before
Lynch, Circuit Judge,
Souter, Associate Justice,*
and Selya, Circuit Judge.
William L. Messenger, with whom the National Right to Work
Legal Defense Foundation, Geoffrey R. Bok, and Stoneman, Chandler
& Miller were on brief, for appellants.
Timothy J. Casey, Assistant Attorney General, with whom Maura
Healey, Attorney General of Massachusetts, was on brief, for
appellees Charlie Baker and Thomas L. Weber.
* Hon. David H. Souter, Associate Justice (Ret.) of the
Supreme Court of the United States, sitting by designation.
Scott A. Kronland, with whom Peder J.V. Thoreen, Altshuler
Berzon LLP, Katherine D. Shea, and Pyle Rome Ehrenberg PC were on
brief, for appellee Service Employees International Union, Local
509.
Sarah A. Smegal, with whom Hackett Feinberg P.C. was on brief,
for the National Federation of Independent Business Small Business
Legal Center, amicus curiae in support of plaintiffs-appellants.
February 5, 2016
SOUTER, Associate Justice. As relevant here, Mass. Gen.
Laws ch. 15D, § 17(b) provides that family child care providers
"shall be considered public employees . . . solely for the purposes
of . . . chapter 150E," the statute authorizing employees in public
service to organize for collective bargaining. The appellants are
such providers (and one assistant to a provider), operating on a
daily basis in their own houses and serving "low-income and other
at-risk children," id. § 17(a), with custodial care and educational
help. They are hired by those legally responsible for the children
at rates set by the Commonwealth, which underwrites the resulting
charges.
A majority of the class of providers in question chose
the appellee Service Employees International Union, Local 509, as
their exclusive agent for bargaining collectively with the
responsible state agency, the Department of Early Education and
Care. The subjects of their attention are customary in collective
bargaining, and include recruitment and training of providers.
Id. § 17(g). The state Legislature nonetheless retains ultimate
discretion over appropriations necessary to fund the government's
subvention. Id. ch. 150E, § 7(b).
No provider is required by statute or by the current
agreement between the Department and the Union to become a union
member or to contribute any money to the Union for any purpose.
While a provider may not bargain separately or furnish services
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under terms different from those set by the collective bargaining
agreement, a provider is free to address the Department, the
Legislature and the public with any expression of disagreement
with a union position, or on the broader policy or philosophy
governing family child care services, or on any other subject.
And a provider may raise a grievance directly with the Department,
although the Union has a right to be represented at any ensuing
meeting, and the Department may take no responsive action at odds
with an existing agreement.
The appellants declined to join the Union and brought
this action in the district court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983
challenging the statutory scheme that authorizes the selection of
an exclusive bargaining agent to agree on terms that affect their
relationships with their clients and the government. Their facial
challenge to the statutory regime claims violation of their rights
of freedom of association and other expressive rights guaranteed
by the First Amendment. The district court dismissed their
complaint under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), and we
affirm.
Our disposition of the constitutional claims turns on
precedent, and the appellants' principal arguments probe the
vitality of that precedent in light of recent developments. The
convenient starting point for purposes of this case is Abood v.
Detroit Board of Education, 431 U.S. 209 (1977), dealing with the
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rights of teachers employed in public education to be free from
enforced association with a union. The Court affirmed the
centrality of exclusive and fair representation to effective
collective bargaining, id. at 220-21, and followed law previously
applied in private sector litigation: it permitted an agency shop
agreement requiring non-union members of a bargaining unit to
contribute a fee in lieu of dues to support the bargaining activity
of an exclusive union-bargaining representative selected by a
majority of bargaining unit employees, id. at 225-26. The
permissible contribution was held to be justified by the
overarching object of promoting labor peace, and by the equity of
preventing free riders, an analysis taken to suffice as to
dissenting public employees as well as to their private
counterparts. Id. at 224. Specifically, the Court held that the
inherently political character of labor agreements and their
implementation in governmental employment was of no constitutional
consequence that could distinguish the claims of public and private
employees. Id. at 232. For that matter, the public-private
distinction was likewise irrelevant under the general rule holding
it unconstitutional to charge non-union employees a fee to support
an exclusive bargaining representative's political activity in the
conventional sense. See id. at 235-37.
Abood's understanding that non-union public employees
have no cognizable associational rights objection to a union
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exclusive bargaining agent's agency shop agreement points
emphatically to the same result here, where no financial support
for any purpose is required from non-union employees. And that
result is all the clearer under Minnesota State Board for Community
Colleges v. Knight, 465 U.S. 271 (1984), which ruled against First
Amendment claims brought by public college faculty members,
professional employees of a state education system, who challenged
a legislative mandate that a union selected as their exclusive
bargaining agent be also the exclusive agent to meet with officials
on educational policy beyond the scope of mandatory labor
bargaining. The Court held that neither a right to speak nor a
right to associate was infringed, id. at 289; like the appellants
here, the academic employees in Knight could speak out publicly on
any subject and were free to associate themselves together outside
the union however they might desire. Their academic role was held
to give them no variance from the general rules that there is no
right to compel state officials to listen to them, id. at 286, and
no right to eliminate the amplification that an exclusive agent
necessarily enjoys in speaking for the unionized majority, id. at
288. Since non-union professionals, college teachers, could claim
no violation of associational rights by an exclusive bargaining
agent speaking for their entire bargaining unit when dealing with
the state even outside collective bargaining, the same
understanding of the First Amendment should govern the position
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taken by the family care providers here, whose objection goes only
to bargaining representation.
The appellants, however, cite Harris v. Quinn, 134 S.
Ct. 2618 (2014), to argue that Knight has been rendered
inapplicable to them owing to the fact that they are not state
employees as customarily understood, even though their
remuneration comes from the Commonwealth. We do not, however,
read Harris as limiting Knight in a way that affects this case.
The First Amendment claimants in Harris were home care
personal assistants hired by individuals but paid by the state,
who objected to a compulsory agency fee requirement. The Court
accepted the distinction they raised, between the conventional
public employees considered in Abood and "partial" public
employees who looked to the state to pay their charges for directly
serving private individuals. Id. at 2368. Given the "partial"
employees' comparatively attenuated relationships both to the
state and to one another, the Court held that imposing an
obligation to pay agency fees was insufficiently supported by the
justifications of labor peace and no free riders that had been
held to warrant mandatory fees in Abood. Id.
But the Harris distinction does not decide this case.
While we can agree with the appellants in assuming the
comparability of Harris's personal assistants and the child care
providers here, the issues at stake in the two cases are different.
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Unlike the Harris litigants, the appellants are not challenging a
mandatory fee; indeed, an agency fee previously enforced against
the providers here was eliminated after Harris came down. What
Harris did not speak to, however, was the premise assumed and
extended in Knight: that exclusive bargaining representation by a
democratically selected union does not, without more, violate the
right of free association on the part of dissenting non-union
members of the bargaining unit. Harris did not hold or say that
this rule was inapplicable to "partial" employees covered by a
collective bargaining agreement. Harris, in fact, did not so much
as mention Knight, and precedent supports applying its rule here.
The subsidiary arguments for reversal do no better. The
appellants, for example, invoke the statutory bar to a union's
discrimination against non-joiners when bargaining to reach a
collective agreement. See Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 150E, § 5. This
limitation, they say, creates a fiduciary obligation implying a
closer and constitutionally more significant association than that
resulting solely from a union's being an exclusive agent. But the
state statute does no more than require the same fair
representation that governs union bargaining under the National
Labor Relations Act, see Abood, 431 U.S. at 221 & n.15, and the
argument thus runs counter to settled federal law devoid of any
hint that a duty of fairness results in impermissibly compelled
association when a union is an exclusive bargaining agent for non-
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union employees. In fact, it is not the presence but the absence
of a prohibition on discrimination that could well ground a
constitutional objection. See Steele v. Louisville & N.R. Co.,
323 U.S. 192 (1944).
Nor does the fiduciary characterization support any
claim of compelled speech on the theory that a "fiduciary" union's
position is the more plausibly imputable to a non-union dissenter.
No matter what adjective is used to characterize it, the
relationship is one that is clearly imposed by law, not by any
choice on a dissenter's part, and when an exclusive bargaining
agent is selected by majority choice, it is readily understood
that employees in the minority, union or not, will probably
disagree with some positions taken by the agent answerable to the
majority. And the freedom of the dissenting appellants to speak
out publicly on any union position further counters the claim that
there is an unacceptable risk the union speech will be attributed
to them contrary to their own views; they may choose to be heard
distinctly as dissenters if they so wish, and as we have already
mentioned the higher volume of the union's speech has been held to
have no constitutional significance. Knight, 465 U.S. at 288.
A trio of appellants' cited authorities may be given
even briefer treatment as not on point. Unlike the auto drivers
in Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705 (1977), the appellants are not
compelled to act as public bearers of an ideological message they
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disagree with. Nor, of course, are they under any compulsion to
accept an undesired member of any association they may belong to,
as in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000), or to
modify the expressive message of any public conduct they may choose
to engage in, the issue addressed in Hurley v. Irish-Am. Gay,
Lesbian & Bisexual Grp. of Bos., 515 U.S. 557 (1995).
Finally, appellants get no support from Mulhall v. UNITE
HERE Local 355, 618 F.3d 1279 (11th Cir. 2010), a case on standing
that recognized only a First Amendment associational interest,
which it distinguished from a right. Quite apart from its limited
scope, Mulhall is an odd case for appellants to cite in their
favor, since it notes the distinction between constitutional,
compulsory "affiliation" with a union and compulsory union
membership, which is not at issue here. Id. at 1288.
The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.
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