This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 16, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Now that the Supreme Court's Janus case has clarified the role that unions must stick to when representing workers, what's next for making

sure that those workers are no longer compelled to support politics they don't like?

Robert Alt is president of Ohio's Buckeye Institute.

We talked about Janice 2.0 at the State Policy Network annual meeting last week.

It ends up being an interesting patchwork and it depends a great deal on state and on the particular

unions.

So one of the first things to recognize is that a number of the unions have taken a very restrictive view of what it is that the Janus decision held.

And once again, Janus was really fundamentally about freedom and money. It was about whether or not public

sector workers could be compelled to pay agency dues or fees to support collective bargaining speech with which they

potentially disagree. And the the key language from the decision is that the

Supreme Court requires prior affirmative consent

from the worker before funds can be transferred legally to the union.

A number of unions have taken the position and state so expressly that the decision only applies

to those individuals, those public sector workers who were non-members at the time that the decision had

come down.

Because of course Mr Janus was not a member of the union and he still had to pay these fees.

That's correct. And so I mean just sort of to pay these fees. That's correct.

And so I mean, just sort of to unpack that for a moment,

prior Supreme Court decisions had said,

you can be forced to pay for collective bargaining speech speech but we can't force you to be a

...