I’m a professor of physics and astronomy. Sadly, my university has a unionized faculty, which I have declined to join. As the precedent stands now, after Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977), the union still gets to charge me a fee every year for what they consider to be “collective bargaining” costs. By default, they will also charge me a fee for their politicking (that brings it to the full union membership cost), and if I don’t want to pay this, I have to “object in a timely manner,” and I have to do it each year. I can’t tell them that I permanently object.

There’s an annual mailing that tells me what the fees are and the deadline for objecting. They’ve played loose with this in the past. Many, many years, especially early on, they didn’t send me anything at all. We few non-union faculty had to email each other and see if anyone had found the deadline, the mailing address, and the fee amounts. One year, they mailed it a month late, and it arrived after the deadline they’d set up for my response. (To their credit, they did accept my objection that year.)