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This Note considers what may be the next major constitutional attack on American labor law: a First Amendment challenge to private sector exclusive representation. In the wake of Janus v. AFSCME, public sector employees filed hundreds of lawsuits alleging that exclusivity compels speech and association by requiring employees to be represented by and associate with a union whose views they oppose. Although those challenges uniformly failed, some commentators have suggested that the same constitutional theory applies with equal force in the private sector, where the state action requirement is satisfied and the Supreme Court has not spoken directly to uphold the arrangement.

Drawing on compelled speech and expressive association doctrine, as well as the post-Janus cases, this Note argues that private sector exclusive representation can survive a First Amendment challenge. It notes that the constitutional impingements imposed by exclusivity are real yet sufficiently attenuated that they fail to outweigh the state interests in labor peace, unitary representation, and workplace majoritarianism. Collective bargaining over the terms and conditions of employment is primarily economic rather than expressive activity, and the involuntary association with unions under the National Labor Relations Act does not interfere with employees’ ability to express their own views, even as unions wade deeper into partisan politics. At the same time, dismantling exclusive representation would invite competing unions in a single workplace and the proliferation of individual employment contracts, threatening the stability of labor relations.

Noting the Supreme Court’s treatment of integrated bar associations and other mandatory relationships, this Note situates exclusive representation within a broader debate about the boundary between economic and political association. Ultimately, it concludes that, even under the current Court’s expansive view of compelled speech and association, the harms imposed by exclusivity are constitutionally permissible because of the federal government’s strong interest in preserving an orderly system of collective bargaining.