The opinion piece appeared in The Columbus Dispatch.

In Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that public-sector workers must affirmatively consent before any money can be taken from them for union fees.

Since Wednesday’s ruling, folks on both sides have unfortunately succumbed to hyperbolic overreaction. The most cursory recollection of our country’s founding reminds us that the same idea of consent was integral to empowering the government in the first place. Accordingly, it should surprise precisely no one that the court was concerned with the compulsion aspect of the case’s facts.

Plaintiff Mark Janus — an ordinary child-support specialist at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services — objected to paying mandatory union fees as a condition of his employment and lamented, “The union voice is not my voice. The union’s fight is not my fight. But a piece of my paycheck every week goes to the union. I am not anti-union... But unions aren’t a fit for everyone. And I shouldn’t be forced to pay money to a union if I don’t think it does a good job representing my interests.”

The Supreme Court agreed with Janus that, indeed, consent matters. Common courtesy and basic human decency have always demanded it, but now — in overruling its own 41-year-old precedent in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education — the court found that the First Amendment requires affirmative consent when it comes to paying union fees, too.

Writing for a five-member majority, Justice Samuel Alito raised the court’s objection to public employees being forced to financially support their unions, “even if they choose not to join and strongly object to the positions the union takes.” Such an arrangement, Alito concluded, “violates the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”

Unions will continue to serve their consenting members for generations to come — only now they will do so more effectively, more efficiently and without trampling the constitutional rights of their members.

Any Ohio unions worried that Janus and other subsequent right-to-work laws will catalyze the end of unions and union membership can rest easy. Empirical studies and data from right-to-work states, including our neighbors Indiana and Michigan, demonstrate that even after enacting right-to-work laws, union membership not only does not suffer but often increases.

In the first full year after Indiana’s right-to-work law took effect, for example, the state added 3,000 new union members. Although union membership initially fell slightly after Michigan adopted right-to-work rules in 2013, it has since recovered, accounting for 15.6 percent of all wage and salary workers in 2017 — up from 14.4 percent in 2016 and well above the national average of 10.7 percent.

After Janus, the quality of public-sector union representation inevitably will improve. Removing coercion and requiring affirmative consent will incentivize union leaders to be more responsive to the needs and desires of their union members, which will increase the value of union membership by refocusing the union’s attention on increasing job satisfaction and working conditions for members.

Happier and better-served union members who have affirmatively consented to their union membership should be our shared end goal across the political spectrum.

Public-sector workers won the long-overdue right to be respected, irrespective of their individual decisions regarding union membership. And, in a nation founded upon the consent of the governed, the standard of consent adopted by the Supreme Court in Janus finally gives our hardworking public servants the voice and choice they have always deserved.

Robert Alt is the president and chief executive officer of The Buckeye Institute in Columbus.