This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 11, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown.

In the case of Friedrich v. California Teachers Union, the court will again grapple with compelled support for union activities.

Andrew Grossman and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute details an argument presented in Cato's brief in that case that perhaps has received too little attention.

You and I have spoken about the Friedrich's case before.

This is a woman who is challenging her support in essence of the teachers union in California.

We've talked about one issue of that, but there's another issue that Cato talks about in its brief.

What is that?

The issue is opt out.

Usually when you say support for a group or an institution,

what it means is you agree with them.

But in this instance, that's not really the case. It just means you're forced to pay for their speech.

The way it works is by default, labor unions assume that everybody who works at a particular institution

is more than happy to fund their political

speech on very controversial issues, on bills that are going through the legislature and so on,

and only recently have the courts recognized that this raises serious First Amendment issues.

So the Supreme Court has at least a little bit chipped away at this idea that it's acceptable for a union to automatically opt you in to their program

and then you have to affirmatively say, I want and the Knox case began to chip what was the

decision in the Knox case right in Knox you were dealing with a special

assessment by a labor union what they called an emergency political fund that was being used to

combat certain referenda in the state of California and the court said well this

special assessment is so anomalous and so unlike anything

we've ever seen before, we're going to go right back to first principles.

...