“Everything we know about Justice Kavanaugh’s record leads us to believe he would operate under a pro-corporation agenda over workers’ rights, over civil rights, and more,” said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), on an August press call. Advocates from AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and AFSCME have echoed calls by the Alliance for Justice and other liberal interest groups for the release of Kavanaugh’s records from his time as a lawyer for the George W. Bush administration.
While only around half of those documents have been made public, Kavanaugh’s decisions from his time as a Bush-appointed judge on the powerful US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reflect a long history of anti-union and anti-labor sentiment.
Kavanaugh has also been a consistent enemy of collective bargaining rights. In a 2007 case, Kavanaugh and a colleague reversed a lower court’s decision siding with AFL-CIO and instead affirmed the Department of Defense’s discretion to negate the collective bargaining rights of employees. This June, Kavanaugh dissented when the court upheld an NLRB ruling that an office furniture manufacturer had set up a splinter company, held by the owner’s daughters, to short-circuit employees’ collective bargaining rights.
Kavanaugh’s nomination comes after the Supreme Court handed down a major anti-union decision in June, when a 5-4 majority ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that non-union public sector employees cannot be forced to pay dues to the unions that negotiate for them. Justice Samuel Alito, writing the majority decision, called such dues a violation of “the free speech rights of nonmembers,” overturning a unanimous 1977 Supreme Court decision finding that union dues were not a threat to the First Amendment.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was nominated by President Donald Trump, was the deciding vote.
