Voices of Freedom - Interview with Nathan McGrath

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

An Interview with Nathan McGrath, President and General Counsel of the Fairness Center   When public employees face retaliation for exercising their constitutional rights or encounter union corruption, where can they turn for help? Often, they're caught between powerful union organizations and limited legal resources, with nowhere to turn for justice.   That's where organizations like the Fairness Center step in to level the playing field.   Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is Nathan McGrath, President and General Counsel of the Fairness Center, a nonprofit law firm providing free legal services to public-sector employees hurt by union officials. Since the landmark 2018 Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME, Nathan and his team have been on the front lines helping workers understand and exercise their constitutional rights.   From challenging illegal contract provisions to exposing embezzled union dues, Nathan's work touches on fundamental questions about individual liberty, constitutional rights, and the proper role of public-sector unions in American democracy.   Topics Discussed on this Episode: Nathan's transition from private practice to constitutional and labor law The Fairness Center's mission to help public employees hurt by union officials How the 2018 Janus v. AFSCME decision changed the landscape for public-sector workers Why small financial disputes can raise crucial constitutional principles Examples of union misconduct from contract violations to outright corruption How different state laws affect public employees' rights across the country Balancing individual constitutional rights with collective representation The broader impact of the Fairness Center's work on worker liberty Biggest challenges facing public-sector employees' constitutional rights today    About Nathan McGrath: Nathan McGrath is President and General Counsel of the Fairness Center, a nonprofit law firm that provides free legal representation to public-sector employees who have been hurt by union officials. The Fairness Center operates across several states and serves federal employees nationwide, taking on cases that other lawyers might overlook due to their size while raising important constitutional principles.

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. When public employees face retaliation for exercising their constitutional rights or encountering union corruption, where can they turn for help? far too often they're caught between powerful union organizations on one hand

and limited resources to pay legal bills on the other but that's where organizations like the Fairness Center step in to try to level the playing field our guest today is Nathan McGrath president and general counsel of the Fairness Center which is a non-profit law firm providing free legal services to public sector employees hurt or damaged by union officials Since the landmark 2018 Supreme Court decision, Janice V. Asmi, which ruled that public employees cannot be forced to pay union dues, Nathan and his team have been on the front lines helping workers understand and exercise their constitutional rights. From challenging illegal contract provisions to actually exposing embezzled union dues, the Fairness Center's work touches on fundamental questions about individual liberty, constitutional rights, and the proper role of public sector unions in American democracy.

Nathan, welcome to Voices of Freedom. It's great to have you. Thank you so much, Rick. It's a pleasure to be here. Absolutely. Let's jump in and start out by just talking about your background. You were in private practice, and you decided to leave that to focus specifically on constitutional and labor law, particularly helping public sector employees. Why did you make that switch? Yeah, I think my story on that starts a few years even before private practice. I worked on the Hill for a congressman for a number of years.

Did you? And yeah, I did. And it was a really neat experience. Part of my portfolio for him was actually labor policy. So I got to see it from that end of things. And I remember thinking multiple times during my couple years there, just that, you know, we can pass great laws. We can help implement great policy.

the rubber is going to really meet the road when it gets out into the real world and judges start to make rulings and lawyers do their work. And I always thought, boy, maybe to be an attorney, maybe that's, that's, you know, the tip of the spear on this. And so I spent a couple years on the hill and then went to law school, went up into private practice. And as the new associate, you know how that goes. You kind of just get thrown into anything and everything. So I got to see a lot of areas of law I really enjoyed and some that I didn't so much. But I think the thing for me, after a couple years, I just wanted to do something that was more mission-oriented, kind of like the bigger impact, the bigger picture, and having a mission to drive me at the core. And so that's really where

my search began, I guess for public interest law. And I kind of, I guess, depending on how you look at it, providentially or accidentally fell into it. And that's what led me to now many years. doing this type of work and eventually to the Fairness Center. Were you working with big law firm, little law firm? I was in a smaller law firm. I was, I think we had two partners, so we handled pretty much every type of law that came through. The general practitioner was in full effect there.

So, you know, you'd go from a criminal hearing in the morning to personal injury and then doing someone's will and trust in the evening. I remember those days as a form of. a lawyer myself. I figured you would. Let's talk now about the Fairness Center itself and its mission. Talk about what it means to provide legal services to those, and I quote, hurt by public sector union officials. And what common situations do you see that cause clients to knock on your door? Yeah, I think for me, the Fairness Center really drew me in with our very narrow and focused mission because we knew what we were about and we've stayed true to that. And I really love the

strategy and how we implement it. So we say we're a national law firm with a state focus. And what that means is that we go to states that we think are strategic decisions and choices to go. We don't take cases from everywhere. We've picked specific states where we want to operate and run our program. And instead of just doing maybe a case in Pennsylvania and then one in Texas, one in, you know, Maryland or whatever, we say, okay, we're opening up shop in Pennsylvania and then we're going to file case after case after case there. And what we've found over, you know, we've been in existence now over 10 years, all of the states where we've been able to kind of how I call it run the program for a sustained period of time, we've been able to make very objective

and substantial changes to the labor landscape. And that's really what our clients want. We often get clients who come to us and say, you know, I've been injured in this way, but I also never want this to happen to anybody else. How do we make a big picture change? And so that's what we help strategize with them. And that's oftentimes what their case is oriented to do to not only help them, but to help other people as well. We've litigated class action lawsuits, which have been very effective where, you know, a lot of public interest firms, they'll sue the government. government, right? And so if they beat the government, typically bureaucrats just want to be told what to do. So if you win, they're just like, okay, instead of doing it way A, we'll now do it way B. And but with

unions, when they're your opposition, often, they say, well, if you take away way A, I have B, C, D, E, and F to get to get around that. And so when you do a class action lawsuit, it brings a lot more fuller relief across the board and bigger picture. And so that is one of the tools that. we use at our law firm to be able to help our clients that way. How many people are on your team? We have seven full-time litigators right now, and the firm is at, I think, 16 people. So we've steadily growing, and it's just been really neat. We're in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Colorado, and I'm sure you won't be shocked, but federal government unions are just as bad. So we're representing the federal government employees too.

So some of your work is state law-based. So you're having to learn the laws of different states. Are the laws wildly different from state to state? You know, it's really interesting because I think that's one of the interesting parts of our work because the state labor laws, while they have generally similar components, like you said, they're very different state-to-state in precedent, in development and that's why one of the things we face, you know, one of the biggest hurdles we face actually is it's not similar or it's not the same everywhere. And so we're constantly when we go

into a new jurisdiction, we have to get the lay of the land. You know, the culture of the unions are different. The client needs are different and the laws are really different. And so we have to hire high level talented attorneys because this isn't a copy and paste type practice. You have to think through every single situation. And, you know, we've had situations where there's really nothing being done to the point that the labor board will say, you know, we don't really have a form for that. Could you make up the form? And so multiple times now, we've actually made up our own form to file it with a state labor board, the federal labor board, because they've never done the type of case that we're going to bring. And so I was talking with our managing

attorney the other day and he was saying yeah i tell people all the time our practice the only similarity is union officials doing illegal stuff he said other than that we're touching so many different types of area law because to really bring relief to our clients we've done risk of cases torts contracts constitutional cases corruption cases it's just across the board and it makes for a very fun practice but you've really got to be on your game. Absolutely. Interesting. Talked about the Janus decision at the top. And of course, again, that decision prohibited mandatory union dues for public employees.

Talk about how that ruling has changed the landscape for public sector workers. Yeah, I think the Janus decision was a really nice step forward, but it wasn't a complete solution for everybody. And so Janus pretty simply was that if you were not a member of the union, you no longer had to pay any fees or any types of dues to the union. Because back pre-Janus, even if you were out of the union and the union still represented the place where you worked, basically, like all the teachers in a school district, even if you weren't a member, you still had to pay the union a certain amount of fees. And that actually caused a lot of litigation. back early in my career, we were doing a lot of that type of work. But now going forward, if you're not a member of the union and you're at a school district where the union represents you, your place of employment, basically, you don't

have to pay any fees. That hasn't made a big difference for, I think, non-members interactions with the union. They have a lot less conflict in some ways that way. But the world is so much bigger than just the union fee issue. And I think that's one of the things that our practice is really good about. We represent union members, non-members, membership organizations. Because public sector union officials can really hurt the rights of many people, taxpayers across the board.

And so we're not focused on just the non-member, but we can represent a whole lot of people when the union officials break the law. And, you know, one thing we did after Janus is we really focused on the membership issue. because if you're if you're not a member of the union, you can claim your chance rights. But if you're a member or if you can't get out of the union, you can't claim them. And so we really focused on litigation surrounding that. And in Pennsylvania, we were able to remove membership restrictions from a number of CBAs. We filed even a couple of class action lawsuits around it.

And so because of our work, about 50,000 public employees in Pennsylvania now can resign whenever they want, which then means they can claim their Janus rights. Yes. Yes. Interesting. I remember back in 2018, there was a lot of celebration about the Janus decision and what it meant as if that were the end. But to your point, it was really only the beginning. In some ways, that was the easy part. As difficult as it was getting to that decision,

it's the implementation and the enforcement of what that now means. Right. And really staying on top of what you do, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's it's everywhere from enforcing Janus rights to helping people claim their Janus rights and then well beyond all of that two things that have nothing even to do with Janus, really. Because for us, the Janus rights component is a small portion of our portfolio, really. Interesting. I mean, let's delve into that. I mean, I imagine a lot of your cases involve relatively small financial disputes, but at the same time raise some pretty important constitutional principles. I've got to guess that a lot of lawyers, not in public interest law, are just

not wanting to take cases like that because of the dollars involved. Why is it crucial for an organization such as yours, such as fairness, to take on these cases? And how do you balance the practical aspects and the principled aspects of your work? maybe that's one of the beauties of public interest law is it's less driven by the dollar I mean I think that's one of the huge appeals because you know let's take for instance a public school teacher who found out that the teacher union now is supporting all sorts of candidates and agendas that she doesn't like and so she goes to resign from the union and you know for whatever multiple reasons they say nope you can't get out of the union tough luck you're

still a union member. Well, in that situation, we would say her constitutional rights have been violated, First Amendment, you know, Freedom Association, you can even throw speech in there sometimes. And so what does she do now? Well, number one, a lot of attorneys don't know what the next step is because it's a very small area, you know, niche law. And but the other thing is, what economic incentive does she have to file a lawsuit that could be $50,000, $100,000? thousand dollars when on her end if she gets out of the union maybe she doesn't have to pay nine hundred or eleven hundred dollars a year like economically you can be as principled as they come but that's pretty big for you know a public uh employee to be able to pony up for a big

first amendment 1983 federal lawsuit and so we have the real honor of being able to stand in the gap for these people and say you know what we um can represent you for free and we can allow you to go and defend your constitutional rights, which in this country, if we don't have our First Amendment rights, boy, we're in bad shape. That's what this all is built off of. And so it's so important, it's so important that these principal people are empowered to be able to defend their constitutional rights, and we're the law from that gets to help them do that.

I mean, beyond Janus, what other constitutional issues are out there? And with respect to all of the issues out there, how do your, how do these employees find you? How do they even know that they have these rights? Is education an issue? I would guess that it is. Yeah, I mean, we are referring. You certainly aren't telling them. No, they're not.

In fact, they often tell them the wrong thing. We get a lot of word of mouth referrals. So a lot of happy clients from the past, we're further friends. You know, it's really interesting. A lot of our clients are the bravest of folks because they will come to us and tell us about the issue they're having and we'll say, is this happening to anybody else? They're like, yeah, there's about 19 other people, but I'm the only one that's willing to like stick my neck out for this.

And we're like, okay. So we'll file a lawsuit. You're not going to get fired. You know, we're going to protect you. And then slowly we see other people start raising their hands. trickling in. So it's those really brave clients that we initially have that will open up these little pockets of other clients to find us and come in. That's part of why our strategy of representing people in the court of law and the court of public opinion is so important because our court of

public opinion is everything from op-eds to advertising to, you know, giving our clients a platform to tell their story to really expose the union's illegal acts and to build public support around our clients. So we'll get a lot of clients just seeing that and coming into us. And so other constitutional cases we've been involved with, we had a Hartford public school teacher. He was a phys ed teacher for over 30 years, never had any discipline. And he was put through a mandatory DEI training. And at the end, offered his opinion of like, hey, I really disagree with that. I think he said I was man-bashed and white shamed and I'm just going to sit here quietly. And well, unbeknownst to him, they started an investigation because he said that. And they didn't tell him until three months later. And at the

end of a 12-month investigation, they gave him a disciplinary letter in his file, made him go to sensitivity training. And he calls it reprogramming. And he asked the union if they would represent him and file a grievance. And they said, no, you're not a member. So we're not going to represent you. So this scenario led to two cases, one at the Connecticut Labor Board for the representational issue. And we actually won for our client there. And because the Connecticut Labor Board said, nope, you represent that bargaining unit and all those teachers. So you need to represent him whether he's a member or not. So we won there. They even called the union's argument wholly frivolous. That's how bad it was. But the constitutional case now was he gave his opinion on something. and was retaliated against. So it was a, you know, a retaliation for expressing an opinion, First Amendment right sort of case.

And so we filed that in federal court for him. And just recently the union or the school district was trying to get rid of it on motion for summary judgment. And we actually had an opinion come out very recently where the judge said, nope. The summary is basically he was speaking as a citizen and he had the right to offer an opinion on that, the case gets to go forward. We're not a DEI firm. We're not an anti-Semitism firm or anything like that, but the unions are violating people's constitutional rights and discriminating against

them based off of, you know, being Israeli or the DEI, the unions are blessing a lot of DEI programs. And if anyone speaks up against it, they're being retaliated against. So a big part of our practice underlying that is constitutional rights, you know, and other Title VII rights. But it's getting into these really interesting cultural issues that are very relevant and pressing today. Beyond legal issues, do you find that your clients are often ostracized in their workplaces? I mean, it's got to be incredibly difficult to go to work every day, I would think. I mean, some of them have experienced really horrendous things all the way to just kind of, well, I get ignored now, and that's kind of the worst.

but I think it really is difficult for them when they stand up against a union and then, you know, we've had teachers tell us at, say, like, an assembly where everyone's together, they will sit alone on basically one side of the room because no one will sit with them because they're just totally ostracized, like what you were saying, everything from that to threaten. And then sometimes they're just kind of left alone. I think sometimes with litigation, even if the union's very unhappy and others are unhappy, you know how it is. The lawyers come in and say, hey, don't talk to them, don't do anything. And so they're largely just kind of left alone. More along these lines, I know your work

has uncovered many examples of union misconduct ranging anywhere from contract violations to outright corruption. Give us some of the more egregious examples that you've run across. And what's that tell us about the accountability of public sector unions? Yeah, I mean, so one of the ones that I think is a good example, we had two clients come to us and say, we think our union treasurer is stealing money. And we said, well, why do you think that? And they're like, well, we got copies of these checks where he wrote the check to himself and then signed the check. And we're like, well, yeah, that could be a problem. Yeah, that seems to be some real evidence. So we filed a lawsuit for them, and a month later, the Pennsylvania state police came in and

arrested this union treasurer. And we thought this case was maybe about like 20, 30,000 and missing dollars. And, oh, he was also writing checks to his friend. So that was kind. He was very generous. And but as we started pulling the strings, it came to pass that that was a local union, but the state affiliate, they were missing about two million. And so far, six of their officials, have been arrested. And there's now, you know, DA's office involved and everything like that. And so it was really, but because of our clients who, you know, raised their hand and came to us and said, hey, we think this is going on. Now all of these other things have been discovered and found out. We had another case where the union we were litigating against, they actually had filed illegal PAC filings, which they

admitted to on the stand. The guy didn't take the fifth. He just said, yep, I signed it. I knew it was wrong and they did it. They also admitted on the stand how they had set up a C3 that was supposed to be an entity to raise money for fallen firefighters' families. And well, you know, they're blown through a lot of money in the union. And so the boards were the same and they passed money from the C3 into the union and gave themselves a pretty steep discount on the loan rate. And I mean, it's just stuff that as they're talking about, you're just going, oh my goodness, this is, this is wild. And we have one case where there was an IRS employee who she was trying to resign from the union and the union president or the official said, you know, you better stop or else I'm going to call your boss and get you in

trouble. And she said, no, I think it's my right to resign. So she still sent her letter. Well, sure enough, her supervisor at the IRS called her in and said, I'm going to put a letter in your file for harassment. And she said, why harassment? She said, well, because you're asking the union official how to resign and harassing him about it. And so we filed charges for her against the union and the IRS. And the federal labor relations authority found. against the IRS and said, yeah, you can't do that. And the neat thing there was they had to tell 2,500 of her coworkers that they messed up and, you know, and she got out of the union and the discipline was removed, all that type of thing.

But we were like, you know what? We think the union probably still had some involvement in that. And so we foyered the emails and found out that the union official had actually said, hey help me shut her up help me take care of her sort of thing so the union was working with the employer to discipline this employee so you know we've now appealed that and saying hey maybe you should look at the union too on this and i mean the the list really goes on i mean we found stuff where they were using union dues to fly union officials girlfriends to on like island vacations $12,000 Rolex watch, tickets to musicals, baseball games, the Super Bowl,

there's been hush money payments, all sorts of things that often unions just aren't held accountable. No one questions them. No one sues them. A lot of times, again, going back to what we were saying earlier, there's just not a lot of financial incentive to. So if you don't find an organization like ours that can bring a top-notch legal team and do a pro bono, the unions know they can just kind of trample people's rights repeatedly and never

get caught. So, you know, I was talking with one of our clients and he was just saying, you know, the unions are supposed to be the check on the system, but who checks the check? And then he pointed at me, he's like, you guys, you guys are the check. And I was like, yeah, that's actually a good way to look at that. Well, I mean, to that point, I'm sure you hear all the time that what you're doing is undermining collective bargaining and it's weakening worker protection. What's your response to that? I mean, my simple response to that is we're just holding union officials accountable to following the law. They often are trampling people's constitutional rights or other legal rights.

They get away with it because of a lot of things that we've just talked about. And so all we're doing is trying to make sure they follow the law. No matter what you agree with as far as collective bargaining goes or something like that, they should at least follow the laws that are in place. And that's what we're helping our clients to do, is to hold them accountable to follow the law. Moving beyond just day-to-day work that you're doing and looking from a broader perspective, what does success look like for the Fairness Center?

What are you trying to accomplish? It's never going to be perfect, but what success? Yeah, I think we have a couple things that we look at. Number one, we're a client-centric firm. So what is our client want to accomplish? And we've been able, even though we are on a cutting edge area, we're often doing things that have no precedent and haven't been done before. Currently, we're sitting at about an 89% success rate in accomplishing our client schools. So I'd say that's a pretty good marker. and one of the things that they really want to do that's not bad right you never know it could vary any year but right now we've been pretty successful that way and our clients are happy about that and but the outcome of that as I said earlier a lot of our clients want to shift the culture they want to make sure this doesn't happen for other people not just them and so I think success is seeing the culture change as our clients wanted to and I would again just going back to what I said earlier I think

we've really had objective substantive change in the states that we've focused in. And that is very exciting to me. And I know that it is for our attorneys as well when we see that happening. And the other thing is just giving our clients a platform to tell their story, right? Whether it's through an op-ed or a TV interview. But a lot of them, that's all they want. They just want people to know. You know, a lot of times they're like, I don't want money back. I don't want this. I just want people. to know how my rights have been violated. And so that is success. Leveling the playing field for them. A lot of these unions have big time law firms that come in, highly paid attorneys. Just, you know, big guns coming in. Well, we need to be equally up to the task and be able to, you know, as you know,

being an attorney, there is a real range of attorneys. And if you're not ready to fight the best with the best, through either rules or arguments or briefing, you can get really outdone. And so we have to be up to the task for our clients as well. And I think we are. And I'm really proud of our firm for that. Are there a lot of cases that you don't take? Our philosophy, because we plant an estate and we want to file repetitive litigation, is usually a lot of cases if they fall within our mission and if we think that, you know,

obviously they're not frivolous or something like that. that, we will take them because that's part of kind of policing the unions and holding them accountable and making sure that they're not stepping out of line. And that's how we're affecting long-term change for our clients is that, you know, okay, the union did this once and they maybe had to pay out some money, but no one's there then to stop them from doing it the second or third time. Well, we want to be those people who are there to stop them the second and third time and eventually they'll give up. And a good example of that is the resignation restrictions here in Pennsylvania. One of the unions within like an 11 or 18 month time period, they would tell people

no, you can't get out of the union. So they'd find us and we'd sue them. And they're like, okay, they can get out of the union and they give them their money back. And then another person would come to us and we do the same thing. And then another person would come to us and they do the same. And people might be like, well, why are you taking? They're all the same types of cases. is, what are you doing? Well, you know what? By the sixth person, the union finally said, you know what, we're not going to do this anymore.

They pulled their resignation restriction out of their policy, out of their collective bargaining agreement, and that collective bargaining agreement applied to 29,000 people. So now 29,000 people don't have a resignation restriction because of our six cases, our six clients, and we just sued and sued and sued until it finally wasn't worth it to them. And, you know, a really rewarding story that happened about a year after that was a potential client called us about something totally different, not about resignation, but he was telling me, he's like, you know, the oddest thing, we used to always get told no when we wanted to resign. I just wrote a letter and got right out. And I started chuckling. He's like, why are you laughing?

I was like, well, that's, that didn't happen by accident. I said, that's, yeah, that's right. That's because the last year, there are a lot of lawsuits brought over that. And he's like, Well, look at that. But just hearing the real world effect that our work is having was really rewarding. That's terrific. Last question, Nathan, what do you see is the biggest challenges facing public sector employees' constitutional rights today? And what gives you a hope about the future of worker liberty? Yeah, I think the biggest problems are even beyond the constitutional problems. We talked about a couple of the constitutional issues, but unions, public sector unions, really where we focus are really in every facet of life, whether it's constitutional violations or

pushing DEI or anti-Semitism or racism, sexism, corruption across the board. Any policy issue that you care about, public sector unions have something to say about that larger than just collective bargaining with public sector unions. And so I would say pick the issue and our clients are involved with it somehow, and we're addressing it in that in some way. And so that's kind of the scope, which is large, but why I am hopeful is because we've actually been able to be successful across the board on a lot of these different things. And, you know, to give you one example, in Connecticut where we are, we have had success at the labor board in the state court and the federal court. And when I I remember when we first announced expansion up into Connecticut, people are like, why are you going

into the Northeast? Don't the unions own everything? Aren't you wasting your time? And we thought it was a strategic decision to be there for some reasons. And just over the years we've been there now, we've won in every jurisdiction, every venue, you know, and we're winning in tough places. And that gives me a lot of hope. Our win rate gives me a lot of hope. And just that people are getting bold and being willing to come and say, hey, here's another issue. help me tackle it. And that gives me a lot of hope for the future. Janus or other reasons, it seems like there's been a tremendous amount of progress in this space over the last, what, eight, nine years. Yeah, I think there's been a lot of decisions and victories

that, you know, especially public employees, but all of us can look and say, hey, constitutional rights are being defended. Courts are going the right way on a lot. of this. Fantastic. Nathan McGrath, thanks so much for spending time with us today. And thanks so much for all that you and your team do on behalf of so many workers across the country. We truly do appreciate it.

And I'm sure they do even more. Thank you so much, Rick. It was a pleasure to be here. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom in America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast. Thank you.