This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 9, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown.

In the final day of its term, the Supreme Court spoke to the circumstances in which unions

may compel support from workers or some union activities.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute comments on the ruling.

The Supreme Court ruled that home health care workers could not be made to pay union dues as if they were

public employees under state subsidy schemes which are themselves part of

federal Medicaid which pay people to take care of sick or disabled persons at home.

And very often these are people who are taking care of their own family members and are getting a check from Medicaid.

And the rationale for the program is that if you did not send them a subsidy to take care of their

demented parent or their handicapped child that they might have to be institutionalized costing everyone much more.

Does it matter in this case because Justice Alito writing for the majority drew this distinction between fully

fledged public employees and these other partial public employees.

Does it matter that whether or not these people were on payroll with

Social Security deductions with various other things that you normally associate with

what we would call full-fledged employment?

For the five justice majority, Justice Alito, came up with a new concept, not previously seen the law of partial public employee and in the case of these

home health care workers really the state of Illinois led by Governor Rod Blagorovich

had deliberately reclassified them as public employees just

for purposes of unionizing them because the SEIU and other unions have made this

a big campaign. They've approached sympathetic state

governments that are allied with the unions and so they took an employment

relationship which was kind of six of one half dozen of the other it was

...