Change May Be Coming For Dues Checkoff After CBA Expiration

Back in August 2021, the newly appointed NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo targeted the 2019 case Valley Hospital Medical Center for reversal in a memo outlining her priorities for her term. Now, with Hood River Distillers, Inc. before the Board dealing with similar issues, Abruzzo has made moves to to deliver on that plan.

Valley Hospital ruled that dues checkoff provisions in a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) expire with the CBA. Once the CBA expires, employers are not required to continue to deduct union dues from employee paychecks and remit them to the union.

That 2019 decision reinstated more than fifty years of NLRB law which had been briefly overturned by the 2015 decision Lincoln Lutheran of Racine, which in turn had overruled the 1962 decision Bethlehem Steel and found that employers were required to continue to remit dues to the union even after CBA expiration.