If you found out you habitually had been overcharged for something or charged for something you didn’t want or know you were getting, you’d have a right to complain, to expect an end to the abuse and to receive reimbursement in full.
If the person responsible for the overbilling agreed to discontinue the practice but refused to refund the balance you’d accrued over time because he hadn’t realized he was overcharging or had thought – erroneously, but in good faith – that the charges were legitimate, you might conclude you had grounds for a lawsuit and take the transgressor to court.
That’s pretty much the way former Illinois state employee Mark Janus felt about paying dues to the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees Council 31. He didn’t belong to the union, didn’t want to belong to the union, and had no interest in any of the services they allegedly provided on his behalf.
Janus took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which last year decided, in Janus v. AFSCME, that First Amendment rights to free speech and free association apply to government employees just like everyone else and protect them from being compelled to pay dues to public-sector unions.
That put an end to the obnoxious practice, but Janus concluded, logically enough, that he and other non-union state workers should be reimbursed for the “untold billions” of dollars in fees they’d been obliged to fork over to the union over the course of four decades, and so he went back to court in pursuit of a fuller measure of justice.
He may have to take this quest all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, too, because state courts so far have sided with the unions, concluding that they acted in “good faith” prior to the High Court’s rendering of the Janus decision. Just last week, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld a lower court’s ruling against Janus.
Here’s hoping he has the last laugh again.