As recently as the 1970s, leaders of Washington’s largest teachers union disputed that label, and members recoiled from it.

The Washington Education Association considered itself a professional organization, devoted to instructional quality. A union? No way.

But times have changed, and nobody would practice that artifice today, not with a straight face. WEA is clearly a union, and its aggressive use of nonmembers’ dues for political causes has come before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Washington state, you don’t have to join WEA to be a public school teacher, but you do have to pay the dues – roughly $700 a year. The rationale is that all public school teachers, WEA members and nonmembers alike, benefit from the traditional bargaining role WEA plays regarding terms of employment and they ought to bear a fair share of that cost.

As WEA shed its reluctance to look unionlike, more and more of those dues went to purposes outside the normal labor relations arena, such as political campaigns for favored candidates and ballot measures.

To some, it seemed that in return for the opportunity to be teachers in this state, many individual educators were forced to contribute financially to political causes they disagreed with. A voter-passed initiative in 1992 required that employers and unions have a worker’s written consent before spending mandatory contributions on political objectives.

But WEA did it anyway, and the organization eventually found itself facing more than half a million dollars in fines and penalties. Lawsuits followed in which WEA claimed that asking nonmembers for advance written permission to use their money on political causes was just too onerous. Instead, it would calculate a portion of the collected dues that had been spent on the prohibited purposes, then allow individual workers to request a refund.

The Washington state Supreme Court finally saw things the union’s way, in effect giving it access to interest-free loans from unwilling lenders and putting the burden on the employees to ask for their money back. If employees forgot to request a refund before an arbitrary deadline, or didn’t know they could, or the paperwork was too daunting, it could be interpreted as their consent.

This week, in an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna reasoned that those employees who had chosen not to join the union in the first place had already implied their unwillingness to support its political agenda.

“The state of Washington’s position is that nonmembers should not be required to say no twice,” McKenna told the justices during oral arguments.

That’s reasonable. If WEA wants the political use of money from people who don’t want to be part of WEA, it’s only fair to expect the organization to get permission in advance. If that’s too burdensome for WEA, WEA should be willing to do without. That’s how a professional organization would act.