Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/17pdf/16-1466_2b3j.pdf
Page Number: 47.0

42  JANUS v. STATE, COUNTY, AND MUNICIPAL EMPLOYEES 

Opinion of the Court 

C 
  Developments since Abood, both factual and legal, have 
also “eroded” the decision’s “underpinnings” and left it an 
outlier among our First Amendment cases.  United States 
v. Gaudin, 515 U. S. 506, 521 (1995). 

1 

Abood  pinned  its  result  on  the  “unsupported  empirical 
assumption” that “the principle of exclusive representation 
in  the  public  sector  is  dependent  on  a  union  or  agency
shop.”  Harris,  573  U. S.,  at  ___  (slip  op.,  at  20);  Abood, 
431  U. S.,  at  220–222.    But,  as  already  noted,  experience 
has shown otherwise.  See supra, at 11–12. 

It  is  also  significant  that  the  Court  decided  Abood 
against  a  very  different  legal  and  economic  backdrop.
Public-sector  unionism  was  a  relatively  new  phenomenon
in 1977.  The first State to permit collective bargaining by
government employees was Wisconsin in 1959, R. Kearney 
&  P.  Mareschal,  Labor  Relations  in  the  Public  Sector  64 
(5th  ed.  2014),  and  public-sector  union  membership  re­
mained relatively low until a “spurt” in the late 1960’s and 
early  1970’s,  shortly  before  Abood  was  decided,  Freeman, 
Unionism Comes to the Public Sector, 24 J. Econ. Lit. 41, 
45  (1986).  Since  then,  public-sector  union  membership
has  come  to  surpass  private-sector  union  membership, 
even  though  there  are  nearly  four  times  as  many  total
private-sector  employees  as  public-sector  employees.    B. 
Hirsch  &  D.  Macpherson,  Union  Membership  and  Earn­
ings Data Book 9–10, 12, 16 (2013 ed.). 

This  ascendance  of  public-sector  unions  has  been 
marked by a parallel increase in public spending.  In 1970, 
total  state  and  local  government  expenditures  amounted
to  $646  per  capita  in  nominal  terms,  or  about  $4,000  per 
capita in 2014 dollars.  See Dept. of Commerce, Statistical
Abstract of the United States: 1972, p. 419; CPI Inflation 
Calculator,  BLS,  http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl.  By