Vice President & Legal Director, National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation
Raymond J. LaJeunesse, Jr., is Vice President and Legal Director of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a non-profit legal aid organization. He was the first Staff Attorney employed by the Foundation and has more than forty-five years of experience helping workers in litigation in federal and state courts and administrative agencies over the abuses of compulsory unionism.
Mr. LaJeunesse has argued four cases in the United States Supreme Court. Those cases include Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Ass’n, 500 U.S. 507 (1991), which limited the purposes for which compulsory union fees collected from public employees may lawfully be spent; Air Line Pilots Ass’n v. Miller, 523 U.S. 866 (1998), which established that unions cannot compel nonmembers to exhaust union-established remedies before going to court to challenge compulsory union fees; and Marquez v. Screen Actors Guild, 525 U.S. 33 (1998), in which the Court recognized that unions must notify employees that they can satisfy the “membership” requirement of “union shop” agreements by just paying fees for union bargaining activities and need not join and pay full dues to keep their jobs. He also was lead attorney in Hohe v. Casey, 956 F.2d 399 (3d Cir. 1992), in which more than $8.3 million in compulsory agency fees was recovered from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees for a class of 57,000 nonmembers.
Mr. LaJeunesse is the author of several published articles about labor law, has testified before Congressional committees several times, and was an Advisor on the Transition Team for Labor- Related Agencies, Office of the President-Elect, in 1980-81 and a legislative aide to a member of the Virginia state legislature. He is a Vice Chairman of the Federalist Society’s Labor and Employment Law Practice Group and has spoken or debated at the Society’s National Lawyers Convention and at many Lawyers and Student Chapters on such topics as Right to Work laws, compulsory unionism arrangements, the misuse of union dues for politics, union organizing tactics (“card check” vs. secret-ballot elections), and the future of the union movement.
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Is “Sectoral Bargaining” a Good Idea?
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Jewish Professors Challenge Forced Representation by an Anti-Semitic Union as Incompatible with the First Amendment
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Flight Attendant Triumphs Over Union and Southwest Airlines in Suit Challenging Illegal Firing; Jury Awards Her $5.1 Million in Damages
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West Virginia Supreme Court’s Decision Upholding Constitutionality of That State’s Right to Work Law Is the Latest in an Unbroken String of Final Decisions Rejecting Such Challenges
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Right to Work Foundation Asks NLRB to Enforce Cannabis Industry Workers’ Rights against State Schemes to Force Them into Union Ranks
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Trump National Labor Relations Board Protects Employee Freedom of Choice
On July 3, 2019, the National Labor Relations Board issued an important decision in Johnson...
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Right to Work Laws in the Courts – The Unions’ Losing Streak Continues
In this blog on January 25, 2018, I reported on the decision of the Circuit...
Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31 - Post-Decision SCOTUScast
Raymond J. LaJeunesse
SCOTUScast featuring Raymond LaJeunesse
On June 27, 2018, the Supreme Court decided Janus v. American Federation of State, County,...
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Heritage Legal Analysis Confirms That NLRB Member William Emanuel Had No Obligation to Recuse in the Controversial “Joint Employer” Case
In a blog here I argued that the National Labor Relations Board’s Inspector General David Berry...
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Faulty Union “Math” Doesn’t Add Up to a Public-Sector Right to Strike
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