CHICAGO (Nov. 10, 2015) – Six Illinois child care providers and home caregivers represented by attorneys from the Liberty Justice Center and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation have filed a federal lawsuit seeking to remove the SEIU as their union representative.

Illinois law forces thousands of child care providers and home-based caregivers to be represented by the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, as a condition of providing care to people who receive subsidies from the government. Even though these caregivers no longer are forced to pay money to the SEIU, thanks to the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Harris v. Quinn, they still are forced to be represented by the union even if they do not want the union to speak for them.

The lawsuit filed today in the federal district court in Chicago seeks to end this practice. The plaintiffs are seeking to strike down the state law that deems the SEIU their “exclusive representative.”

“The government has no right to appoint an ‘exclusive representative’ to speak on citizens’ behalf just because they benefit from a government program,” said Jacob Huebert, senior attorney at the Liberty Justice Center, a public-interest law firm, who is co-counsel in the lawsuit. “Under the First Amendment, individuals get to decide for themselves what they will say to the government and who will speak on their behalf. This lawsuit asks the federal courts to strike down this unconstitutional scheme.”

Victory in the case would build upon the Supreme Court’s decision in Harris v. Quinn, in which the Court ruled that forcing home-based caregivers who are not government employees to pay union fees violated their First Amendment rights.

“Home-based caregivers should not be forced to associate with a union they have no interest in joining or supporting,” said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Foundation. “We hope this case will build on the Supreme Court’s landmark, Foundation-won Harris decision to protect caregivers’ freedom of association and put a stop to union bosses’ forced home care unionization schemes.”

BACKGROUND:

In 2003, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich issued an executive order that said a group of Illinois residents who provide home-based care for people with disabilities through a state Medicaid program would be considered state workers for the sole purpose of unionization. Following the executive order, a state law was passed that granted the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, exclusive representation of these home caregivers. Blagojevich signed a similar executive order in 2005 for child care providers who served children from low-income families. That executive order also was followed by a state law designating the SEIU the exclusive representative of these child care providers. These executive orders and the subsequent laws allowed government unions to force child care providers and home caregivers to pay union dues as a condition of their clients’ or family members’ receiving help from the state.

Between 2009 and 2013, the SEIU collected more than $30 million in compulsory union dues and fees from home caregivers, and an additional $44 million-plus from child care providers who were force-unionized.

But in a landmark decision in 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Harris v. Quinn that it was illegal to force people to pay money to a union as a condition of helping people  who participate in state entitlement programs. The Court held that these caregivers were not state employees, and therefore could not be forced into a union or forced to pay union dues or fees.

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The Liberty Justice Center is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public-interest law firm that specializes in protecting individual rights and enforcing limits on government power. Since its founding, the Liberty Justice Center has focused on cases related to protecting economic liberty, private property rights, free speech and other fundamental rights in Illinois and beyond. To learn more about the Liberty Justice Center, visit libertyjusticecenter.org.