A child care site manager at Scandia Elementary School is suing Teamsters Local 320, alleging the union is not allowing her to drop her membership. Attorney Doug Seaton says the U-S Supreme Court, in the highly-publicized Janus case, affirmed workers’ rights to leave a union without impediments and stop paying dues — but Seaton says many unions still have time windows when members can do that. “Nobody knows these dates, nobody has copies of these documents and, if you ask for them, you get often, frankly, a runaround so that you never do know when the window is,” Seaton says.
The Education Minnesota teachers union calls the lawsuit a national strategy supported by right-wing billionaires to undermine labor unions. President Denise Specht says the suit claims, “a little insultingly, that people… can’t read and understand a membership agreement.”