ALBANY -- New York wants to protect union rights amid a pending U.S. Supreme Court case.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation Thursday that will allow unions to keep collecting fees from employees if the critical court case strips unions the ability to do so.
The new law comes as a response to the current Supreme Court case JANUS v. AFSCME from Illinois -- where a worker is challenging whether employees must pay “agency fees” to a union.
The ruling will determine the legality of the fees that are collected from employees who do not wish to join the union.
"We're going to sign that Janus bill, but my friends that is the first step of the resistance," Cuomo said Thursday at a Manhattan rally with unions.
"We sign that bill, then we go to work and we turn this state around and we turn this nation around and we make America America again."
The New York law will allow unions to continue to collect dues from employees who choose not to be union members, regardless of the federal case.
The court case will have major implications in New York, which by far has the largest percentage of union members of any state in the country.
Union members accounted for over 23 percent of workers in New York in 2016. Nationwide, the average was almost 11 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
New York has nearly 2 million union members, second only to California with 2.6 million.
The argument for these collected fees is that all employees benefit from the collective bargaining of the union.
These fees are deducted from an employee's paycheck -- one of 22 states currently allowing these fees to be collected by unions.
Without the fees, employees would still be receiving certain benefits from the collective bargaining of the union, but the union would have less money to provide certain benefits with.
If the court case goes against the unions, they could be without as much as $110 million a year, according to a review by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative group in Albany.
The law requires that New York’s public employers give certain information to unions, such as new employees names, addresses and their work locations.
It also requires that public employers notify unions within 30 days of a new employee being hired or rehired and that the union will be allowed to meet with the employee without a deduction to their pay or allowed time off.
The legislation allows New York unions to keep collecting these dues and fees and allows unions to collect deductions electronically from employers.
