No. Even before right-to-work legislation, Wisconsin workers in unionized workplaces did not have to join unions, although they could be required to pay a portion of union dues to compensate the union for representational services such as negotiating collective bargaining agreements, challenging employee discipline and termination, and arbitrating disputes over wages and benefits.
Under federal labor law, unions have a duty to represent not only their members, but everyone in a bargaining unit. A bargaining unit consists of non-supervisory employees who are similarly situated in the workplace. In a factory, for example, the bargaining unit is usually every non-supervisory employee working in production. Since unions have to represent everyone in the bargaining unit, they historically required everyone to be in the union and pay dues. Throughout the decades there have been many legal challenges to this practice, claiming that it violated employees' rights of association to be required to join a union, and violated their rights of free speech to be required to contribute funds for political action. A series of Supreme Court cases, culminating in Communication Workers of America v. Beck, 487 U.S. 735 in 1988, established that: 1) Employees cannot be required to join a union in a unionized workplace; 2) Employees can be required to pay an "agency fee" to the union that includes only the portion of dues used to represent the bargaining unit (negotiating collective bargaining agreements, challenging employee discipline and termination, and arbitrating disputes over wages and benefits); 3) Employees have a right to challenge the amount of an agency fee and obtain an explanation of how agency fees are spent. As a result, in recent decades unions have generally endeavored to allocate the vast majority of dues collected to the cost of representing employees, and have funded political action by soliciting members to voluntarily contribute to union political action committees (PACs).
When right to work laws are adopted, unions still have to represent the entire bargaining unit, but employees can choose to pay no dues, thus obtaining the union's representational services at no cost.
