By Lesley Weidenbener
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – The Indiana Supreme Court has upheld a controversial right-to-work law as constitutional after determining no union is required to represent a specific group of workers.

The unanimous decision ends two court challenges to the law and overturns decisions by two Lake County judges who had declared it unconstitutional. Those judges ruled the measure prevents unions from receiving “just compensation” – as spelled out by the Indiana Constitution – for providing services to non-union members.

But the state’s highest court said the union’s obligation to represent non-members is actually optional. “It only occurs when the union elects to be the exclusive bargaining agent, for which it is justly compensated by the right to bargain exclusively with the employer,” Justice Brent Dickson wrote in the opinion.

And the court also said any such compensation is only necessary when “the state demands particular services, not when the federal government does so.”

Four justices signed onto the majority opinion. Justice Robert Rucker wrote a concurring but separate opinion in which he argued “there may very well exist a set of facts and circumstances that if properly presented and proven could demonstrate that a union has actually been deprived of compensation.” But, he added, “this is not that case.”

The Indiana law frees workers from paying fees to unions they don’t join. The Republican-controlled legislature passed it in 2012 over the objections of Democrats and labor leaders – as well as thousands of union members who protested at the Statehouse – who said the law would lead to lower wages and unsafe workplaces. Supporters said it would make Indiana a more attractive place to do business.

“The ruling by our Supreme Court confirmed that the people’s elected representatives in the legislature were within their legal authority to craft an economic policy prohibiting involuntary union dues and this policy does not violate the Indiana Constitution,” Attorney General Greg Zoeller said in a statement issued Thursday.

“Though Hoosiers have differences of opinion on this issue, we all should show respect for the court and the legal process by which laws are tested,” he said.

During oral arguments in September, the state’s solicitor general, Thomas Fisher, argued against the union’s interpretation of the “just compensation” provision of the state constitution.

He said the court should treat right-to-work like other laws that regulate relationships between individuals and companies – such as those involving car rentals or utilities. He said if the court ruled that the just compensation requirement applies to the unions, the state would likely face an “enormous number of challenges” involving other private transactions.

Unions had also challenged the right-to-work law in federal court but both a district judge and the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the state law did not violate federal law or the U.S. Constitution.

Lesley Weidenbener is executive editor of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

Jennifer Nelson for www.theindianalawyer.com

The Indiana Supreme Court has ruled that two sections of the state’s right-to-work law do not violate the Indiana Constitution. A Lake County judge declared the challenged statutory provisions unconstitutional in a July ruling.

Plaintiffs Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, AFL-CIO and several of its members and officers sought a declaratory judgment that the right-to-work law violates several portions of the state constitution.

Lake Superior Judge John M. Sedia sua sponte found that I.C. 22-6-6-8 and 22-6-6-10 violate Article I, Section 21 of the Indiana Constitution. The judge found that “the effect of IC 22-6-6-8 and IC 22-6-6-10 under the current, long-standing federal labor law, is to demand particular services without just compensation,” and thus violates Section 21.

On appeal, the State and the union dispute whether the challenged provisions of the RTW law constitute a demand by the state for particular services under Section 21.

“Any compulsion to provide services does not constitute a demand made by the State of Indiana,” Justice Brent Dickson wrote in Gregory F. Zoeller, Attorney General and Rick J. Ruble, Commissioner of the In. Dept. of Labor v. James M. Sweeney, David A. Fagan, Charles Severs et. al., 45S00-1309-PL-596.

Justice Robert Rucker concurred in result with a separate opinion, writing there may be a case that if properly presented and proven could demonstrate that a union has actually been deprived of compensation for particular services by application of the right-to-work law, so as to that union, the statute would be unconstitutional.

“However, this is not that case,” he wrote.

By Lesley Weidenbener

By Dan Carpenter
TheStatehouseFile.com

When conservatives can run successfully against a president who has presided over reduced government spending, reduced deficits, lowered unemployment, record heights of corporate wealth, a health-care program that pleases both the public and the health-care industry, and even sub-$3 gas, perhaps irrational fear of the first man of his color to occupy the White House could be said to have infiltrated the voting booth.

When big business, directly and through its surrogates, pours hundreds of thousands of  no shadowdollars into a school board race and achieves a majority, perhaps control of the targeted school system has left the voting booth.

The consequences of Tuesday’s rout of citizenship by Citizens United may turn out to be less profound in Washington than in Indianapolis. It is hard to imagine Republican obstructionism of President Barack Obama getting any worse, and these days only a filibuster-proof Senate could hope to pass significant legislation. As if the GOP in six years of Obama-bashing ever has offered solutions to the problems for which it blames Brother Barack.

Locally, the triumph of candidates bankrolled by Stand for Children, the Chamber of Commerce, ex-Reagan administration operative Al Hubbard and other benefactors from far beyond the cracked sidewalks of Indianapolis Public Schools has to mean more shrinkage of the once-dominant school system and thus less of a voice for those who reside within it. In other words, more “entrepreneurial” reform – that is, more charter schools to siphon off tax dollars into private hands with dubious public oversight – along with the nation’s most promiscuous program of private school vouchers. Look for a school system that once topped 100,000 pupils to be left with an overwhelmingly poor population of 20,000 or so by decade’s end. Maybe then, milked dry by those who covet its funding, it will cease being hammered for its failure to fix poverty.

As for the voice that would be lost, it’s hardly worth mourning. After all, it’s gotten little use. Here, as in all those gubernatorial and congressional elections around the country where corrupt and incompetent tools of Wall Street rode tidal waves of dollars into office, poor and working people had no reason not to know what was going on and no excuse for their pitiful turnout at the polls.

They knew what the GOP-engineered voting restrictions were all about; and they knew, or should have known, that far higher barriers were surmounted in the Jim Crow South.

They knew the avalanche of TV assaults and gaudy flyers said nothing true that wasn’t an insulting platitude.

They knew their president and their school system, flawed as they were, deserved defense at fundamental – indeed, existential – levels.

They have to know their interests don’t coincide with those of the financiers of election campaigns.

They didn’t vote. Not at nearly the level of the rich and white. So they’ll live with plutocracy.

Apathy is understandable. Disillusionment is a fresh wound. The people’s mobilization that swept Obama and Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz into office a few short years ago was answered by shameless sabotage of their mandate. What this shows, though, is that democracy is a fulltime job. Every election is a start-over; and besides that, all the time between elections must be spent reminding whoever is in power that the boss is watching.

It’s hard work. So tempting to stay home and hope they don’t sell off the company.

Dan Carpenter is a freelance writer, a contributor to The Indianapolis Business Journal and the author of “Indiana Out Loud.”