Union-dues law OK, Indiana told

CHICAGO — An Indiana law that bars making the payment of union dues a condition of getting or keeping a job is valid under the U.S. Constitution, a divided federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

Twenty-four states have some form of such so-called right-to-work measures and most are “substantially identical” to Indiana’s law, the Chicago-based panel said in a 2-1 ruling.

The decision comes almost a year after an Indiana trial court said the measure violated the state’s constitution. That ruling will be argued before Indiana’s Supreme Court on Thursday. A second state-court judge also ruled against the law. The state is appealing.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs, members of the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 150 of the AFL-CIO, contended the law requires unions to represent nonmembers equally at the bargaining table, creating a “free rider problem,” according to the majority decision.

U.S. Circuit Judge John Tinder, writing for the majority, disagreed.

“The union is justly compensated by federal laws’ grant to the union the right to bargain exclusively with the employer,” he and U.S. Circuit Judge Daniel Manion said. “The reason the union must represent all employees is that the union alone gets a seat at the negotiating table.”

Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Diane Wood dissented.

“The nonmember of the union will reap the benefits of being represented by the union during a grievance, for instance, but he will pay nothing for those benefits which might include a lay representative, maybe even a lawyer, investigative services and so on — all things that cost the union real dollars to provide,” she said.

Both Tinder and Manion were appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, while Wood was named to the appellate court by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

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