Anti-Right to Work Campaign in Ohio Roughs up the Truth
Contrary to what fist-clenching union officials would have Ohio citizens believe, the individual employee’s freedom not to join a union receives only nominal protection in the Buckeye State today. Image: www.progressohio.org
While the importance of and need for an Ohio Right to Work law are now being recognized by more and more citizens, grass-roots proponents have yet to agree about what is the most promising approach for reaching their objective. Nevertheless, Big Labor is getting worried that the Buckeye State could become the 25th to prohibit the firing of employees for refusal to pay dues or fees to an unwanted union.
At least, that seems to be the most likely explanation for the shrillness of the anti-Right to Work op-ed by Courtney Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Big Labor front group We Are Ohio, that appeared in the Columbus Dispatch last week.
To defend the forced-unionism status quo in Ohio, Johnson asserts much that is either grossly misleading or altogether false. Most of it cannot be addressed in a blog post of a manageable length. So we will focus briefly today on how Johnson depicts current policies favoring monopolistic unionism. This is ground the Institute has covered many times before, but since propagandists such as Johnson routinely ignore the obvious objections to the claims they make, it is necessary to make basically the same rebuttal again and again.
Johnson baldly asserts that it is already the case in her state that “no one has to join a union to get a job — that’s the law in Ohio.”
In reality, the freedom not to join a union is only nominally protected in Ohio and other forced-unionism states. There is no genuine right not to join a union. And Johnson and her cohorts would surely acknowledge this themselves if the shoe were on the other foot.
Under federal laws covering private-sector employees and state laws covering public-sector employees, the right to join and pay dues to a union is truly protected in Ohio. An employee who wants to join and pay dues to a union (covering both bargaining and nonbargaining activities) is free to do so. It doesn’t matter what his or her employer thinks. It doesn’t matter what a majority of his or her fellow employees think. Neither your employer nor your fellow employees have any right to restrict your right to join OR financially support a union.
If current law in Ohio said, you have a right to join a union over the objection of your employer and the majority of your fellow employees, but if they object you can’t pay dues to cover the cost of union bargaining, would Johnson say the right to join is truly protected? I feel confident in saying, she would not.
And by that standard, the freedom not to join a union is unprotected in Ohio. Both private-sector employees and public-sector employees have only a nominal right not to join a union that is installed as the monopoly-bargaining agent in their workplace. They can continue to hold their jobs, technically, as union nonmembers, but they can be forced to pay “financial core” dues or “agency” fees to the union that may legally, in some cases, be as high as full union dues.
When confronted with such facts, forced-unionism apologists like Johnson often justify such arrangements on the basis of “majority rule” or “employer freedom of contract.” But under federal labor law and Ohio law, as we noted above, neither the employer nor the majority of employees have the legal power to prevent employees who want a union from joining and giving it as much financial support as they want.
In reality, Johnson and her ilk believe the right not to join a union is less deserving of legal protection than the right to join, and that therefore it is okay that the law treats an individual worker who wants a union differently from an individual union who doesn’t want one.
I am confident Right to Work supporters would not agree with whatever justification Big Labor apologists offer for having different degrees of freedom of association for employees with different views about unions.
But before we discuss the justifications, I think Johnson owes it to be the people of Ohio to be straightforward.
She should acknowledge, “Yes, the law in Ohio now offers far less protection to the individual worker’s freedom not to join a union than it does to his or her freedom to join. And it should.”
This would be far preferable to implying, falsely, that the freedom not to join a union is fully protected under current Ohio law.