472
Opinion of the Court
tional for the State of Michigan to require government employees who objected to unions or union activities to contribute to an "agency shop" arrangement requiring all employees to pay union dues as a condition of employment. We held that compelled contributions to support activities related to collective bargaining were "constitutionally justified by the legislative assessment of the important contribution of the union shop" to labor relations. Id., at 222. Relying on our compelled-speech cases, however, the Court found that compelled contributions for political purposes unrelated to collective bargaining implicated First Amendment interests because they interfere with the values lying at the "heart of the First Amendment[—]the notion that an individual should be free to believe as he will, and that in a free society one's beliefs should be shaped by his mind and his conscience rather than coerced by the State." Id., at 234-235; see also id., at 235.
Here, however, requiring respondents to pay the assessments cannot be said to engender any crisis of conscience. None of the advertising in this record promotes any particular message other than encouraging consumers to buy California tree fruit. Neither the fact that respondents may prefer to foster that message independently in order to promote and distinguish their own products, nor the fact that they think more or less money should be spent fostering it, makes this case comparable to those in which an objection rested on political or ideological disagreement with the content of the message. The mere fact that objectors believe their money is not being well spent "does not mean [that] they have a First Amendment complaint." Ellis v. Railway Clerks, 466 U. S. 435, 456 (1984).
Moreover, rather than suggesting that mandatory funding of expressive activities always constitutes compelled speech in violation of the First Amendment, our cases provide affirmative support for the proposition that assessments to fund a lawful collective program may sometimes be used to pay for speech over the objection of some members of the
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