We’ll take the liberty of adding an 11th item to Scott Witlin’s excellent list of the top-10 most common right to work misconceptions.
11. Right to work laws do not necessarily allow employees to immediately stop paying dues.
The devil’s in the details. In numerous Indiana union shops, workers asked to be freed from their dues-paying obligations after Right to Work was enacted. Michigan employers may be experiencing this already as well. Some Indiana employers stopped deducting their union dues. But it’s not the simple. As we have discussed before in this blog, employers must retrieve their employee’s dues authorization cards before they can stop taking union dues from their paychecks. As the NLRB has previously held in several cases, the language in the dues authorization cards control as to when and how an employee can revoke his or her consent to the dues deductions.
© 2012 BARNES & THORNBURG LLP
