Public sector employees may no longer have to make financial contributions to their unions. This term, the issue before the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus v. AFSCME is whether public-sector “agency shop” arrangements should be invalidated under the First Amendment. Agency shop arrangements require employees who are not members of a union to pay “agency fees” or “fair share fees,” which are a proportionate share of the costs of union representation. Fair share fees may not to be used by unions to further political purposes. Forty years ago, the Abood Court held that such agency shop clauses were valid insofar as the service charge is used to finance the union's expenditures for collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment.

Janus v. AFSCME seeks to overturn Abood. In 2015, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner initiated the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Governor Rauner challenged an Illinois statute that allows unions representing public employees to collect dues from their members and fair share fees from non-member employees. Governor Rauner claimed that the statute violated the First Amendment by compelling employees who disapprove of the union to contribute financially to it.

The district court dismissed Governor Rauner's lawsuit for lack of standing, but permitted two public employees, Mark Janus and Brian Trygg, to intervene. On review, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the employees' claims on procedural grounds: Trygg's claim was dismissed, because he had already challenged the requirement that he pay the union fair share fees before the Illinois Labor Relations Board and the Illinois Appellate Court. Janus's claim was dismissed because neither the district court nor the court of appeals could overrule Abood. Granting Janus' petition for writ of certiorari on September 28, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to reconsider whether Abood should be overruled.