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The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear a challenge to the way public-sector unions finance their operations. Union officials said a ruling against them would deal a blow to organized labor.

The case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, No. 14-915, teachers in California who chose not to join the union and who said being compelled to pay union fees they did not agree with violated their First Amendment rights.

Limiting the power of public unions has been a long sought goal of conservative groups, and they welcomed Tuesday’s development.

“The question of whether teachers and other government employees can be required to subsidize the speech of a union they do not support as a condition of working for their own government is now squarely before the court,” Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, said in a statement.

The challengers say that some collective bargaining with a government employer amounts to lobbying and that forcing them to pay for those activities violates their First Amendment rights.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case in its next term, which begins in October.

Last year, the court stopped just short of overruling a foundational 1977 decision and declaring that government workers may not be forced to pay dues to unions to represent them in collective bargaining negotiations if they disagreed with the positions the unions took.

In that 1977 decision, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Supreme Court said that teachers who declined to join a union could nevertheless be required to help pay for the union’s collective bargaining efforts to prevent freeloading and ensure “labor peace.”

The new case asks the justices to overrule Abood.