Court Opinion

ID: 9426793
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:18:57.448087+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:03.201009
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Powell,
with whom The Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Blackmun join, concurring in the judgment.
The Court today holds that a State cannot constitutionally compel public employees to contribute to union political activities which they oppose. On this basis the Court concludes that "the general allegations in the complaints, if proved, establish a cause of action under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.” Ante, at 237. With this much of the Court’s opinion I agree, and I therefore join the Court’s judgment remanding this case for further proceedings.
*245But the Court’s holding and judgment are but a small part of today’s decision. Working from the novel premise that public employers are under no greater constitutional constraints than their counterparts in the private sector, the Court apparently rules that public employees can be compelled by the State to pay full union dues to a union with which they disagree, subject only to a possible rebate or deduction if they are willing to step forward, declare their opposition to the union, and initiate a proceeding to establish that some portion of their dues has been spent on “ideological activities unrelated to collective bargaining.” Ante, at 236. Such a sweeping limitation of First Amendment rights by the Court is not only unnecessary on this record; it is in my view unsupported by either precedent or reason.
I
The Court apparently endorses the principle that the State infringes interests protected by the First Amendment when it compels an individual to support the political activities of others as a condition of employment. See ante, at 222-223, 233-235. One would think that acceptance of this principle would require a careful inquiry into the constitutional interests at stake in a case of this importance. But the Court avoids such an inquiry on the ground that it is foreclosed by this Court’s decisions in Railway Employes’ Dept. v. Hanson, 351 U. S. 225 (1956), and Machinists v. Street, 367 U. S. 740 (1961). With all respect, the Court’s reliance on these cases, which concerned only congressional authorization of union-shop agreements in the private sector, is misplaced.
A
The issue before the Court in Hanson was the constitutionality of the Railway Labor Act’s authorization of union-shop agreements in the private sector. Section 2 Eleventh of that Act, 45 U. S. C. § 152 Eleventh, provides in essence that, notwithstanding any contrary provision of state law, employers *246and unions are permitted to enter into voluntary agreements whereby employment is conditioned on payment of full union dues and fees. See ante, at 218 n. 11. The suit was brought by nonunion members who claimed that Congress had forced them into “ideological and political associations which violate their right to freedom of conscience, freedom of association, and freedom of thought protected by the Bill of Rights.” 351 U. S., at 236.
Acceptance of this claim would have required adoption by the Court of a series of far-reaching propositions: (i) that there was sufficient governmental involvement in the private union-shop agreement to justify inquiry under the First Amendment; (ii) that a refusal to pay money to a union could be “speech” protected by the First Amendment; (iii) that Congress had interfered with or infringed that protected speech interest by authorizing union shops; and (iv) that the interference was unwarranted by any overriding congressional objective. The Court adopted only the first of these propositions: It agreed with the Supreme Court of Nebraska that § 2 Eleventh, by authorizing union-shop agreements that otherwise might be forbidden by state law, had involved Congress sufficiently to justify examination of the First Amendment claims.
On the merits the Court concluded that there was no violation of the First Amendment. The reasoning behind this conclusion was not elaborate. Some language in the opinion appears to suggest that even if Congress had compelled employers and employees to enter into union-shop agreements, the required financial support for the union would not infringe any protected First Amendment interest.1 But the Court *247did not lose sight of the distinction between governmentally compelled financial support and the actual effect of the Railway Labor Act: “The union shop provision of the Railway Labor Act is only permissive. Congress has not compelled nor required carriers and employees to enter into union shop agreements.” (Footnote omitted.) 351 U. S., at 231. As the Court later reflected in Street:
“[A] 11 that was held in Hanson was that § 2, Eleventh was constitutional in its bare authorization of union-shop contracts requiring workers to give ‘financial support’ to unions legally authorized to act as their collective bargaining agents. . . .” 367 U. S., at 749.
To the extent that Hanson suggests that withholding financial support from unions is unprotected by the First Amendment against governmental compulsion, it is significantly undercut by the subsequent decision in Street. The claim before the Court in Street was similar to that in Hanson: minority employees complained that they were being forced by a union-shop agreement to pay full union dues. This time, however, the employees specifically complained that part of their dues was being used for political activities to' which they were opposed. And this time the Court perceived that the constitutional questions were “of the utmost gravity.” 367 U. S., at 749. In order to avoid having to decide those difficult questions, the Court read into the Act a restriction on a union’s use of an employee’s money for political activities: “ [W] e hold . . . that § 2, Eleventh is to be construed to deny the unions, over an employee’s objection, the power to use his exacted funds to support political causes which he opposes.” Id., at 768-769.
In so reading § 2 Eleventh to avoid “unnecessary constitutional decisions,” 367 U. S., at 749, Street suggests a rethinking *248of the First Amendment issues decided so summarily — indeed, almost viewed as inconsequential — in Hanson. To be sure, precisely because the decision in Street does not rest explicitly on the Constitution, the opinion for the Court supplies no more reasoned analysis of the constitutional issues than did the opinion in Hanson. But examination of the Court’s strained construction of the Railway Labor Act in light of the various separate opinions in Street suggests that the Court sought to leave open three important constitutional questions by taking the course that it did.
First, the Court’s reading of the Act made it unnecessary to decide whether the withholding of financial support from a union’s political activities is a type of “speech” protected against governmental abridgment by the First Amendment. Mr. Justice Douglas, who wrote the opinion for the Court in Hanson and provided the necessary fifth vote in Street, believed that “use of union funds for political purposes subordinates the individual’s First Amendment rights to the views of the majority.” 367 U. S., at 778. Mr. Justice Black expressed a similar view in dissent. Id., at 790-791. But Mr. Justice Frankfurter, joined by Mr. Justice Harlan, strongly disagreed, id., at 806, and the Court’s reading of the statute made it unnecessary to resolve the dispute.
Second, the Court’s approach made it possible to reserve judgment on whether, assuming protected First Amendment interests were implicated, Congress might go further in approving private arrangements that would interfere with those interests than it could in commanding such arrangements. Mr. Justice Douglas had no doubts that the constraints on Congress were the same in either case:
“Since neither Congress nor the state legislatures can abridge [First Amendment] rights, they cannot grant the power to private groups to abridge them. As I read the First Amendment, it forbids any abridgment by government whether directly or indirectly.” Id., at 777.
*249But here, too, Mr. Justice Frankfurter disagreed:
''[W]e must consider the difference between . . . compulsion and the absence of compulsion when Congress acts as platonically as it did, in a wholly non-coercive way. Congress has not commanded that the railroads shall employ only those workers who are members of authorized unions. . . . When we speak of the Government 'acting’ in permitting the union shop, the scope and force of what Congress has done must be heeded. There is not a trace of compulsion involved — no exercise of restriction by Congress on the freedom of the carriers and the unions. . . .” Id., at 806-807.
And here, too, the Court’s reading of the statute permitted it to avoid an unnecessary constitutional decision.2
Finally, by placing its decision on statutory grounds, the Court was able to leave open the question whether, assuming the Act intruded on protected First Amendment interests, the intrusion could be justified by the governmental interests asserted on its behalf. Hanson made it unnecessary to address this issue with respect to funds exacted solely for collective bargaining.3 And by reading the Railway Labor Act to pro*250hibit a union’s use of exacted funds for political purposes, Street made it unnecessary to discuss whether authorizing such a use of union-shop funds might ever be justified.4
In my view, these cases can and should be read narrowly. The only constitutional principle for which they clearly stand is the narrow holding of Hanson that the Railway Labor Act’s authorization of voluntary union-shop agreements in the private sector does not violate the First Amendment. They do not hold that the withholding of financial support from a union is protected speech; nor do they signify that the government could constitutionally compel employees, absent a private union-shop agreement, to pay full union dues to a union representative as a condition of employment; nor do they say anything about the kinds of governmental interests that could justify such compulsion, if indeed justification were required by the First Amendment.
B
The Court’s extensive reliance on Hanson and Street requires it to rule that there is no constitutional distinction between what the government can require of its own employees and what it can permit private employers to do. To me the distinction is fundamental. Under the First Amendment the government may authorize private parties to enter into voluntary agreements whose terms it could not adopt as its own.
We stressed the importance of this distinction only recently, *251in Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co., 419 U. S. 345 (1974). There a New York resident had brought suit against a private utility, claiming that she had been denied due process when the utility terminated her service without notice or a hearing and alleging that the utility's summary termination procedures had been “specifically authorized and approved” by the State. In sustaining dismissal of the complaint, we held that authorization and approval did not transform the procedures of the company into the procedures of the State:
“The nature of governmental regulation of private utilities is such that a utility may frequently be. required by the state regulatory scheme to obtain approval for practices a business regulated in less detail would be free to institute without any approval from a regulatory body. Approval by a state utility commission of such a request from a regulated utility, where the commission has not ... put its own weight on the side of the proposed practice by ordering it, does not transmute a practice initiated by the utility and approved by the commission into 'state action.' ” Id., at 357.
Had the State itself adopted the procedures it approved for the utility, it would have been subject to the full constraints of the Constitution.5
*252An analogy is often drawn between the collective-bargaining agreement in labor relations and a legislative code. This Court has said, for example, that the powers of a union under the Railway Labor Act are “comparable to those possessed by a legislative body both to create and restrict the rights of those whom it represents . . ." Steele v. Louisville & N. R. Co., 323 U. S. 192, 202 (1944). Some have argued that this analogy requires each provision of a private collective-bargaining agreement to meet the same limitations that the Constitution imposes on congressional enactments.6 But this Court has wisely refrained from adopting this view and generally has measured the rights and duties embodied in a collective-bargaining agreement only against the limitations imposed by Congress. See Emporium Capwell Co. v. Western Addition Community Org., 420 U. S. 50, 62-65 (1975); NLRB v. Allis-Chalmers Mfg. Co., 388 U. S. 175, 180-181 (1967).7
Similar constitutional restraint would be wholly inappropriate in the public sector. The collective-bargaining agreement to which a public agency is a party is not merely analogous to legislation, it has all of the attributes of legisla*253tion for the subjects with which it deals. Where a teachers’ union, for example, acting pursuant to a state statute authorizing collective bargaining in the public sector, obtains the agreement of the school board that teachers residing outside the school district will not be hired, the provision in the bargaining agreement to that effect has the same force as if the school board had adopted it by promulgating a regulation. Indeed, the rule in Michigan is that where a municipal collective-bargaining agreement conflicts with an otherwise valid municipal ordinance, the ordinance must yield to the agreement. Detroit Police Officers Assn. v. Detroit, 391 Mich. 44, 214 N. W. 2d 803 (1974) (holding that a duly enacted residency requirement for police must yield to any contrary agreement reached by collective bargaining).
The State in this case has not merely authorized agency-shop agreements between willing parties; it has negotiated and adopted such an agreement itself. Acting through the Detroit Board of Education, the State has undertaken to compel employees to pay full fees equal in amount to dues to a union as a condition of employment. Accordingly, the Board’s collective-bargaining agreement, like any other enactment of state law, is fully subject to the constraints that the Constitution imposes on coercive governmental regulation.8
*254Because neither Hanson nor Street confronted the kind of governmental participation in the agency shop that is involved here, those cases provide little or no guidance for the constitutional issues presented in this case.9 With the understanding, therefore, that the Court writes on a clean constitutional slate in the field of public-sector collective bargaining, I turn to the merits.
II
The Court today holds that compelling an employee to finance a union’s “ideological activities unrelated to collective bargaining” violates the First Amendment, regardless of any asserted governmental justification. Ante, at 236-. But the Court also decides that compelling an employee to finance any union activity that may be “related” in some way to collective bargaining is permissible under the First Amendment because such compulsion is “relevant or appropriate” to asserted governmental interests. Ante, at 222-223, 225 n. 20. And the Court places the burden of litigation on the individual. In order to vindicate his First Amendment rights in a union *255shop, the individual employee apparently must declare his opposition to the union and initiate a proceeding to determine what part of the union’s budget has been allocated to activities that are both “ideological” and “unrelated to collective bargaining.” Ante, at 237-241.
I can agree neither with the Court’s rigid two-tiered analysis under the First Amendment, nor with the burden it places on the individual. Under First Amendment principles that have become settled since Hanson and Street were decided, it is now clear, first, that any withholding of financial support for a public-sector union is within the protection of the First Amendment; and, second, that the State should bear the burden of proving that any union dues or fees that it requires of nonunion employees are needed to serve paramount governmental interests.
A
The initial question is whether a requirement of a school board that all of its employees contribute to a teachers’ union as a condition of employment impinges upon the First Amendment interests of those who refuse to support the union, whether because they disapprove of unionization of public employees or because they object to certain union activities or positions. The Court answers this question in the affirmative: “The fact that [government employees] are compelled to make . . . contributions for political purposes works ... an infringement of their constitutional rights,” ante, at 234, and any compelled support for a union “has an impact upon” and may be thought to “interfere in some way with” First Amendment interests. Ante, at 222. I agree with the Court as far as it goes, but I would make it more explicit that compelling a government employee to give financial support to a union in the public sector — -regardless of the uses to which the union puts the contribution — impinges seriously upon interests in free speech and association protected by the First Amendment.
In Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1 (1976), we considered the *256constitutional validity of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, as amended in 1974, which in one of its provisions limited the amounts that individuals could contribute to federal election campaigns. We held that these limitations on political contributions “impinge on protected associational freedoms”:
“Making a contribution, like joining a political party, serves to affiliate a person with a candidate. In addition, it enables like-minded persons to pool their resources in furtherance of common political goals. The Act’s contribution ceilings thus limit one important means of associating with a candidate or committee . . . .” Id., at 22.
That Buckley dealt with a contribution limitation rather than a contribution requirement does not alter its importance for this case. An individual can no more be required to affiliate with a candidate by making a contribution than he can be prohibited from such affiliation. The only question after Buckley is whether a union in the public sector is sufficiently distinguishable from a political candidate or committee to remove the withholding of financial contributions from First Amendment protection. In my view no principled distinction exists.
The ultimate objective of a union in the public sector, like that of a political party, is to influence public decisionmaking in accordance with the views and perceived interests of its membership. Whether a teachers’ union is concerned with salaries and fringe benefits, teacher qualifications and in-service training, pupil-teacher ratios, length of the school day, student discipline, or the content of the high school curriculum, its objective is to bring school board policy and decisions into harmony with its own views. Similarly, to the extent that school board expenditures and policy are guided by decisions made by the municipal, State, and Federal Gov*257ernments, the union’s objective is to obtain favorable decisions — and to place persons in positions of power who will be receptive to the union’s viewpoint. In these respects, the public-sector union is indistinguishable from the traditional political party in this country.10
What distinguishes the public-sector union from the political party — and the distinction is a limited one — is that most of its members are employees who share similar economic interests and who may have a common professional perspective on some issues of public policy. Public school teachers, for example, have a common interest in fair teachers’ salaries and reasonable pupil-teacher ratios. This suggests the possibility of a limited range of probable agreement among the class of individuals that a public-sector union is organized to represent. But I am unable to see why the likelihood of an area of consensus in the group should remove the protection of the First Amendment for the disagreements that inevitably will occur. Certainly, if individual teachers are ideologically opposed to public-sector unionism itself, as are the appellants in this case, ante, at 212-213, one would think that compelling them to affiliate with the union by contributing to it infringes their First Amendment rights to the same degree as compelling them to contribute to a political party. Under the First Amendment, the protection of speech does not turn on the likelihood or frequency of its occurrence.
Nor is there any basis here for distinguishing “collective-bargaining activities” from “political activities” so far as the interests protected by the First Amendment are concerned. Collective bargaining in the public sector is “political” in any meaningful sense of the word. This is most obvious when *258public-sector bargaining extends — as it may in Michigan 11 — to such matters of public policy as the educational philosophy that will inform the high school curriculum. But it is also true when public-sector bargaining focuses on such “bread and butter” issues as wages, hours, vacations, and pensions. Decisions on such issues will have a direct impact on the level of public services, priorities within state and municipal budgets, creation of bonded indebtedness, and tax rates. The cost of public education is normally the largest element of a county or municipal budget. Decisions reached through collective bargaining in the schools will affect not only the teachers and the quality of education, but also the taxpayers and the beneficiaries of other important public services. Under our democratic system of government, decisions on these critical issues of public policy have been entrusted to elected officials who ultimately are responsible to the voters.12
Disassociation with a public-sector union and the expression of disagreement with its positions and objectives therefore lie at “the core of those activities protected by the First Amendment.” Elrod v. Burns, 427 U. S. 347, 356 (1976) (plurality opinion).
“Although First Amendment protections are not confined *259to ‘the exposition of ideas,' Winters v. New York, 333 U. S. 507, 510 (1948), ‘there is practically universal agreement that a major purpose of th[e] Amendment was to protect the free discussion of governmental affairs . . . Mills v. Alabama, 384 U. S. 214, 218 (1966).” Buckley, 424 U. S., at 14.
As the public-sector agency shop unquestionably impinges upon the interests protected by the First Amendment, I turn to the justifications offered for it by the Detroit Board of Education.13
B
“Neither the right to associate nor the right to participate in political activities is absolute ....” CSC v. Letter Carriers, 413 U. S. 548, 567 (1973). This is particularly true in the field of public employment, where “the State has interests as an employer in regulating the speech of its employees that differ significantly from those it possesses in connection with regulation of the speech of the citizenry in general.” Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U. S. 563, 568 (1968). Nevertheless, even in public employment, “a significant impairment of First Amendment rights must survive exacting scrutiny.” Elrod v. Burns, 427 U. S., at 362 (plurality opinion); accord, id., at 381 (Powell, J., dissenting).
“The [governmental] interest advanced must be paramount, one of vital importance, and the burden is on the *260government to show the existence of such an interest. . . . [C]are must be taken not to confuse the interest of partisan organizations with governmental interests. Only the latter will suffice. Moreover, . . . the government must ‘emplo [y] means closely drawn to avoid unnecessary abridgment . . . .’ Buckley v. Valeo, supra, at 25.” Id., at 362-363 (plurality opinion).
The justifications offered by the Detroit Board of Education must be tested under this settled standard of review.14
As the Court points out, ante, at 224-226, the interests advanced for the compulsory agency shop that the Detroit Board of Education has entered into are much the same as those advanced for federal legislation permitting voluntary agency-shop agreements in the private sector. The agency shop is said to be a necessary adjunct to the principle of exclusive union representation; it is said to reduce the risk that nonunion employees will become “free riders” by fairly distributing the costs of exclusive representation; and it is said to promote the cause of labor peace in the public sector. Ante, at 220-221. While these interests may well justify encouraging agency-shop arrangements in the private sector, there is far less reason to believe they justify the intrusion *261upon First Amendment rights that results from compelled support for a union as a condition of government employment.
In Madison School Dist. v. Wisconsin Employment Relations Comm’n, 429 U. S. 167, 175 (1976), we expressly reserved judgment on the constitutional validity of the exclusivity principle in the public sector. The Court today decides this issue summarily:
“The confusion and conflict that could arise if rival teachers’ unions, holding quite different views as to the proper class hours, class sizes, holidays, tenure provisions, and grievance procedures, each sought to obtain the employer’s agreement, are no different in kind from the evils that the exclusivity rule in the Railway Labor Act was designed to avoid.” Ante, at 224.
I would have thought that “conflict” in ideas about the way in which government should operate was among the most fundamental values protected by the First Amendment. See New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254, 270 (1964). That the “Constitution does not require all public acts to be done in town meeting or an assembly of the whole,” Bi-Metallic Investment Co. v. State Bd. of Equalization, 239 U. S. 441, 445 (1915), does not mean that a State or municipality may agree to set public policy on an unlimited range of issues in closed negotiations with “one category of interested individuals.” Madison School Dist., supra, at 175. Such a commitment by a governmental body to exclude minority viewpoints from the councils of government would violate directly the principle that “government must afford all points of view an equal opportunity to be heard.” Police Dept. of Chicago v. Mosley, 408 U. S. 92, 96 (1972) ,15
*262The Court points out that the minority employee is not barred by the exclusivity principle from expressing his viewpoint, see ante, at 230. In a limited sense, this may be true. The minority employee is excluded in theory only from engaging in a meaningful dialogue with his employer on the subjects of collective bargaining, a dialogue that is reserved to the union. It is possible that paramount governmental interests may be found — at least with respect to certain narrowly defined subjects of bargaining — that would support this restriction on First Amendment interests. But “the burden is on the government to show the existence of such an interest.” Elrod v. Burns, 427 U. S., at 362 (plurality opinion). Because this appeal reaches this Court on a motion to dismiss, the record is barren of any demonstration by the State that excluding minority views from the processes by which governmental policy is made is necessary to serve overriding governmental objectives. For the Court to sustain the exclusivity principle in the public sector in the absence of a carefully documented record is to ignore, rather than respect, “the importance of avoiding unnecessary decision of constitutional questions.” Ante, at 236-237.
The same may be said of the asserted interests in eliminating the “free rider” effect and in preserving labor peace. It may be that the Board of Education is in a position to demonstrate *263that these interests are of paramount importance and that requiring public employees to pay certain union fees and dues as a condition of employment is necessary to serve those interests under an exclusive bargaining scheme. On the present record there is no assurance whatever that this is the case.16
Before today it had been well established that when state law intrudes upon protected speech, the State itself must shoulder the burden of proving that its action is justified by overriding state interests. See Elrod v. Burns, supra, at 363; Healy v. James, 408 U. S. 169, 184 (1972); Speiser v. Randall, 357 U. S. 513, 525-526 (1958). The Court, for the first time in a First Amendment case, simply reverses this principle. Under today’s decision, a nonunion employee who would vindi*264cate his First Amendment rights apparently must initiate a proceeding to prove that the union has allocated some portion of its budget to “ideological activities unrelated to collective bargaining.” Ante, at 237-241. I would adhere to established First Amendment principles and require the State to come forward and demonstrate, as to each union expenditure for which it would exact support from minority employees, that the compelled contribution is necessary to serve overriding governmental objectives. This placement of the burden of litigation, not the Court's, gives appropriate protection to First Amendment rights without sacrificing ends of government that may be deemed important.

 The Court compared the union shop to the organized bar: “On the present record, there is no more an infringement or impairment of First Amendment rights than there would be in the case of a lawyer who by state law is required to be a member of an integrated bar.” 351 U. S., at 238. Mr. Justice Douglas, author of the Court’s opinion in Hanson, *247later remarked that “on reflection the analogy fails.” Lathrop v. Donohue, 367 U. S. 820, 879 (1961) (dissenting opinion).

 The Court today simply reads the separate opinion of Mr. Justice Douglas in Street as expressing the holding of the Court in Hanson. Ante, at 227 n. 23; see ante, at 222-223. While it may be possible to read Hanson this way, see n. 1, supra, it is certainly unnecessary to do so in light of the issues actually presented and resolved in that case. The Court offers no explanation of why Justices Frankfurter and Harlan, who believed that “the scope and force of what Congress has done must be heeded,” 367 U. S., at 807, would acquiesce in the finding of governmental action in Hanson if that finding represented a definitive ruling that governmental authorization of a private union-shop agreement subjects the agreement itself to the full constraints of the First Amendment.

 Whether because no First Amendment interests were implicated, or because Congress had done nothing affirmatively to infringe such interests, or because any infringement of First Amendment interests was necessary to serve overriding governmental purposes, the Court was unanimous that the *250Railway Labor Act was constitutional insofar as it protected private agreements that would compel payment of sufficient fees to cover collective-bargaining costs. 367 U. S., at 771; 778 (Douglas, J., concurring); 779 (opinion of Whittaker, J.); 791 (Black, J., dissenting); 804 (Frankfurter, J., dissenting).

 The Court explicitly reserved judgment on “the matter of expenditures for activities in the area between the costs which led directly to the complaint as to 'free riders,’ and the expenditures to support union political activities.” Id., at 769-770.

 This is not to say, of course, that governmental authorization of private action is free from constitutional scrutiny under the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. The historical context of a facially permissive enactment may demonstrate that its purpose and effect are to bring about a result that the Constitution forbids the legislature to achieve by direct command. It is well established, for example, that a State cannot promote racial discrimination by laws designed to foster and encourage discriminatory practices in the private sector. See Reitman v. Mulkey, 387 U. S. 369 (1967); cf. Moose Lodge No. 107 v. Irvis, 407 U. S. 163, 176-177 (1972). And the Court in Street would not have read the Railway Labor Act as restrietively as it did, had it not been concerned that a broader reading might result in the indirect curtailment of First Amendment rights by Congress. But I am not aware that the Court has ever before held, as it *252apparently has today, that the same constitutional constraints invariably apply when the government fosters or encourages a result in the private sector by permissive legislation as when it commands that result by the full force of law.

 See Note, Individual Rights in Industrial Self-Government — A “State Action” Analysis, 63 Nw. U. L. Rev. 4 (1968); cf. Blumrosen, Group Interests in Labor Law, 13 Rutgers L. Rev. 432, 482-483 (1959).

 If collective-bargaining agreements were subjected to the same constitutional constraints as federal rules and regulations, it would be difficult to find any stopping place in the constitutionalization of regulated private conduct. “Most private activity is infused with the governmental in much the way that the union shop is. . . . Enacted and decisional law everywhere conditions and shapes the nature of private arrangements in our society. This is true with the commercial contract — regulated as it is by comprehensive uniform statutes — no less than with the collective bargaining agreement . . . .” H. Wellington, Labor and the Legal Process 244r-245 (1968).

 Cf. Summers, Public Sector Bargaining: Problems of Governmental Decisionmaking, 44 U. Cin. L. Rev. 669, 670 (1975):
“The uniqueness of public employment is not in the employees nor in the work performed; the uniqueness is in the special character of the employer. The employer is government; the ones who act on behalf of the employer are public officials; and the ones to whom those officials are answerable are citizens and voters. "Wie have developed a whole structure of constitutional and statutory principles, and a whole culture of political practices and attitudes as to how government is to be conducted, what powers public officials are to exercise, and how they are to be made answerable for their actions. Collective bargaining by public employers must fit within the governmental structure and must function consistently with our governmental processes; the problems of the public employer *254accommodating its collective bargaining function to government structures and processes is what makes public sector bargaining unique.”

 The Court’s reliance on Hanson and Street is ambivalent, to say the least. Street construed § 2 Eleventh of the Railway Labor Act “to deny the unions, over an employee’s objection, the power to use his exacted funds to support political causes which he opposes.” 367 U. S., at 768-769. The opinion distinguishes not only between those union activities which are related to collective bargaining and those which are not, but “between the use of union funds for political purposes and their expenditure for nonpolitical purposes.” Id., at 769 n. 17. Yet the Court today repudiates the latter distinction, holding that nothing turns on whether union activity may be characterized as political. Ante, at 231-232. If it is true, as the Court believes, that Hanson and Street declare the limits of constitutional protection from a governmental union shop, ante, at 222-223, the Court’s abandonment of the political-nonpolitical distinction drawn by those cases can only be explained by a desire to avoid its full implications in the public sector, where the subjects of bargaining are inherently political. See infra, at 256-258.

 The leadership of the American Federation of Teachers, with which the local union involved in this case is affiliated, has apparently taken the position that collective bargaining should extend to every aspect of educational policy within the purview of the school board. See J. Weitzman, The Scope of Bargaining in Public Employment 85-88 (1975).

 Michigan law requires public agencies to bargain with authorized unions on all “conditions of employment,” Mich. Comp. Laws § 423.211 (1970), but does not limit the permissible scope of public-sector bargaining to such conditions.

 See Summers, supra, n. 8, at 672:
“The major decisions made in bargaining with public employees are inescapably political decisions. . . . Directly at issue are political questions of the size and allocation of the budget, the tax rates, the level of public services, and the long term obligations of the government. These decisions . . . are to be made by the political branches of government — by elected officials who are politically responsible to the voters. . . .”
See also Hortonville School Dist. v. Hortonville Ed. Assn., 426 U. S. 482, 495 (1976); Wellington & Winter, Structuring Collective Bargaining in Public Employment, 79 Yale L. J. 805, 858-860 (1970).

 Compelled support of a private association is fundamentally different from compelled support of government. Clearly, a local school board does not need to demonstrate a compelling state interest every time it spends a taxpayer’s money in ways the taxpayer finds abhorrent. But the reason for permitting the government to compel the payment of taxes and to spend money on controversial projects is that the government is representative of the people. The same cannot be said of a union, which is representative only of one segment of the population, with certain common interests. The withholding of financial support is fully protected as speech in this context.

 The Court’s failure to apply the established First Amendment standards articulated in Elrod v. Burns and Buckley v. Valeo is difficult to explain in light of its concession that disassociation with a union’s activities is entitled to full First Amendment protection regardless of whether those activities may be characterized as political. Ante, at 231-232, and n. 28. One may only surmise that those in the majority today who joined the plurality opinion in Elrod hold the unarticulated belief that compelled support of a public-sector union makes better public policy than compelled support of a political party. I am at a loss to understand why the State’s decision to adopt the agency shop in the public sector should be worthy of greater deference, when challenged on First Amendment grounds, than its decision to adhere to the tradition of political patronage. See Elrod, 427 U. S., at 376-380, 382-387 (Powell, J., dissenting).

 By stressing the Union’s duty of fair representation, ante, at 221-222, the Court may be suggesting that the State has provided an adequate means for minority viewpoints to be heard within the Union. But even if Michigan law could be read to impose a broad obligation on the union to listen to and represent the viewpoints of all employees on such issues as *262curriculum reform, imposition of such an obligation on the Union could not relieve the school board of its responsibilities — at least, it could not do so unless the Union were declared to be a public agency to which the State had delegated some part of the school board’s power. Yet such a delegation of state power, covering an unlimited range of the school board’s responsibility to set school policy, see nn. 10 and 11, supra, would itself raise grave constitutional issues. If power to determine school policy were shifted in part from officials elected by the population of the school district to officials elected by the school board’s employees, the voters of the district could complain with force and reason that their voting power and influence on the decisionmaking process had been unconstitutionally diluted. See Kramer v. Union School Dist., 395 U. S. 621 (1969); Hadley v. Junior College Dist., 397 U. S. 50 (1970).

 Unions in the public sector may be expected to spend money in a broad variety of ways, some of which are more closely related to collective bargaining than others, and some of which are more likely to stimulate “ideological” opposition than others. With respect to many of these expenditures, arriving at the appropriate reconciliation of the employees’ First Amendment interests with the asserted governmental interests will be difficult.
I should think that on some narrowly defined economic issues — teachers’ salaries and pension benefits, for example — the case for requiring the teachers to speak through a single representative would be quite strong, while the concomitant limitation of First Amendment rights would be relatively insignificant. On such issues the case for requiring all teachers to contribute to the clearly identified costs of collective bargaining also would be strong, while the interest of the minority teacher, who is benefited directly, in withholding support would be comparatively weak. On other issues — including such questions as how best to educate the young — the strong First Amendment interests of dissenting employees might be expected to prevail.
The same may be said of union activities other than bargaining. The processing of individual grievances may be an important union service for which a fee could be exacted with minimal intrusion on First Amendment interests. But other union actions — such as a strike against a public agency — may be so controversial and of such general public concern that compelled financial support by all employees should not be permitted under the Constitution.