Today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Harris v. Quinn has significant implications for at least 47,000 informal, unlicensed private child care providers who have been forced to pay the equivalent of dues to two of New York State’s largest public-sector unions.

In a 5-4 decision, the court said the state of Illinois could not require Medicaid personal home care assistants who choose not to join a state-designated union to pay the equivalent of dues through an agency fee arrangement. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the court’s 1977 ruling in Abood v Detroit Board of Education precedent, which upheld union agency-fee arrangements in the public sector, does not apply to workers who are not “full-fledged public employees.”

The closest New York State counterparts to the Illinois workers are the child care providers first  unionized under an executive order issued by then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2007.  The providers in question are independent contractors, subsidized by government grants but hired by parents. Some are licensed day-care operators; others are friends or relatives of the low-income working moms whose kids they watch. In recent years, unions across the country have been eying these informal caregiver networks as a new frontier for building membership rolls and political influence.

Under Spitzer’s order, which was subsequently enacted into law by the Legislature in 2010, about 32,000 child care providers in New York City were organized by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT). Another 15,000 providers in the rest of the state are represented by Local 100B of Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA).  (The head counts are provided by the unions on their websites; they sum up to less than 60,000 providers that were originally estimated to be affected by the law.)

The state Office of Child and Family Services in January 2012 instructed county welfare agencies to begin deducting union dues of up to $690 per union member from subsidized child care provider payments. An agency fee equivalent to dues is deducted from payments to covered child care providers who refuse to join the unions. In fact, according to this website for child care providers unhappy with the fee arrangements, a majority of the providers never returned ballots in the original union elections, which were conducted by mail.

New York’s law makes it clear that, like the Illinois group affected by today’s Supreme Court ruling, the child care workers roped into UFT and CSEA do not have an “employer-employee relationship” with the state or its subdivisions, and are not entitled to public sector retirement or health benefits, and are not subject to indemnification if sued.

Today’s decision would strongly suggest that the New York agency-fee arrangement for child care providers should also come to an end. Stay tuned.

** PS — New York headed a list of 14 states, plus the District of Columbia, that filed a joint amicus brief in support of Illinois’ position in the Harris case. The brief argued in defense of the states’  power to broadly and “flexibly” apply Abood in the public sector.