## Facts

- Illinois operated a Medicaid-funded Home Services Program allowing eligible recipients to hire “personal assistants” (PAs) for in-home care rather than institutionalization.
- Individual recipients controlled hiring, firing, training, supervision, discipline, and day-to-day work, while the State set certain baseline terms (including pay rates) and issued paychecks.
- Illinois designated PAs as “public employees” solely for collective-bargaining purposes and recognized a union as the exclusive bargaining representative.
- The collective-bargaining agreement included an agency-fee (fair-share) requirement compelling nonmembers to pay for collective bargaining and related representational activities.
- Several nonmember PAs objected and alleged that compelled agency fees violated their First Amendment rights.

## Issues

1. Whether the First Amendment permits a state to require “partial” or “quasi-public” employees—paid with state funds but primarily directed by private individuals—to pay agency fees to a union they do not wish to support.
2. Whether the Court should extend the rule permitting agency fees for full-fledged public employees to this different employment arrangement.

## Decision

- The Court reversed the judgment upholding the agency-fee requirement as applied to the objecting PAs.
- The Court held that the First Amendment prohibits collecting agency fees from these PAs who decline to join or support the union.
- The Court declined to extend the public-sector agency-fee rule to this category of workers, treating them as “partial public employees.”
- The Court did not overrule prior precedent approving agency fees for full-fledged public employees, but sharply criticized its reasoning and limited its reach.

## Legal Principles

- Compelled financial support of union speech triggers demanding First Amendment review and must be justified by a compelling governmental interest that cannot be achieved through significantly less restrictive means.
- Preventing “free-riding” on union representation, standing alone, is generally insufficient to overcome First Amendment objections to compelled subsidies of speech.
- A state’s interest in “labor peace” does not justify compelled agency fees where the structure and history of the work relationship do not show the risks associated with multiple competing representatives in a traditional public workplace.
- Precedent permitting agency fees for full-fledged public employees does not automatically apply to workers who are not meaningfully controlled by the state as an employer and lack typical incidents of public employment.

## Conclusion

The Court held that Illinois could not compel Medicaid-funded in-home personal assistants—who were largely directed by individual recipients rather than the State—to pay union agency fees, because the asserted interests in labor peace and avoiding free-riding did not satisfy the First Amendment standard for compelled subsidies of speech in this quasi-public employment setting.


Harris v. Quinn, 573 U.S. 616 (2014)