The National Restaurant Association's Training Scheme Is Unconstitutional

[ShazzieB]

16. I think the headline is a statement of the author's opinion.

The author (an expert in labor law and labor relations) explains why he believes it's unconstitutional in the article:

So states are requiring workers to pay a fee to an organization that then uses the fees to fund political operations which many of the workers oppose. Sound familiar? It should. That’s because the Supreme Court has held that states may not require workers to pay fees to a union because to do so is to compel the workers to fund speech with which they may disagree. Indeed, the impermissibility of using mandatory fees for political expenditures has been established for decades. As the Court made clear in Abood (and reaffirmed in Janus), it views such compelled subsidization of political speech as unconstitutional under the First Amendment. But the food worker training system outlined in the Times has many of the same constitutional defects that the Court ascribes to mandatory union fees. (Whether ServSafe constitutes an effective monopoly in any of the four states, including whether workers have adequate notice that they can choose an alternative training provider, are important questions but are unlikely to change the underlying analysis.) Put differently, if mandatory union fees are unconstitutional so too are these mandatory food safety training fees, as long as the fees are used to fund political expenditures.

This makes sense to me. Of course, if it goes all the way to the Supreme Court, they can decide whatever they want, but it sounds like they have a reasonable case.