Ohio Adjutant General’s Department v. Federal Labor Relations Authority, which the Supreme Court will hear on Monday, involves the collective-bargaining rights of “dual status” military technicians who work in the Ohio National Guard. The court will decide whether these workers can receive protection from the Federal Labor Relations Authority, the federal agency that enforces the collective-bargaining rights of federal employees.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the National Guard is a joint state-federal endeavor. As a result of this embedded structure, the technicians have a somewhat complicated dual status: Their employment is an amalgam of federal and state, and of civilian and military, duties. Enlistment in the Guard is mandatory for technicians, and they wear a state military uniform when performing state military duties. But they are also provided the benefits and rights of federal civilian employees when engaging in a wide variety of “civilian-like” clerical, administrative, and technical roles in support of the Guard’s daily operations. The technicians in this case had been unionized for 45 years when the Guard, in effect, terminated its collective-bargaining relationship with their union, the American Federation of Government Employees, Local 3970, AFL-CIO.

The case begins with a common “union avoidance” narrative. The Guard and the union had entered into a long series of collective-bargaining agreements, most recently in 2011, and the most recent agreement was...

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