Tennessee’s new law banning unions from deducting dues from teacher paychecks is clear to go into effect.
A panel of three Davidson County Chancery Court judges issued an order Friday denying the Tennessee Education Association’s (TEA) request for a temporary injunction of the new law.
The payroll deduction ban is a part of the recently passed “Teacher Paycheck Protection Act” that raised the minimum teacher salary to $42,000. Supporters argued the ban was needed to keep taxpayer dollars from being used to collect union dues and to ensure teachers aren’t coerced into supporting unions like the TEA.
The TEA filed a lawsuit in June challenging the payroll provision and the court temporarily barred the dues ban from going into effect on July 1.
In its lawsuit, the TEA argued the legislation’s dues deduction ban violated state and federal laws prohibiting “impairing the obligation of contracts.” The TEA also claimed the caption for the legislation violated Tennessee’s Caption Clause because it referenced “relative to wages” but didn’t mention dues deductions specifically.
Chief Judge Anne C. Martin, Judge A. Blake Neill, and Judge Pamela A. Fleenor found deficiencies with each point of the TEA suit and declared it unlikely to succeed. That includes the TEA’s argument that the legislation’s caption didn’t adequately explain what it did.
“Here, the term “relative to wages” is general enough to cover both sections of the Act,” wrote the court. “The legislature could have chosen to have a caption more specific than “relative to wages,” but it did not. That is its prerogative, and it by itself is not a choice that will cause the Court to hold that the Act violates the Caption Clause.”
An estimated 46,000 teachers have used the automatic deduction process to pay their TEA dues this year. The union uses that money to fund its political operations.
The TEA also argued banning these dues deductions wrongfully impacts contracts with local school districts that allow them. Judges disagreed, claiming the dues deduction ban is only a “minor adjustment” to the contracts.
“In barring payroll deductions for membership dues, the Act prevents association members from utilizing a “reliable, convenient, and secure way to ensure uninterrupted access to the benefits of membership.” These are valid concerns. However, we cannot say that these concerns rise to the level of a “substantial impairment” under established precedent that constitutes a Contract Clause violation,” wrote the court.
The order against the temporary injunction also removes the possibility of a delay for new teacher raises. The legislation lacks a severability clause that guarantees those raises remain if another section of the act is successfully challenged.
