Forced-Unionism Apologists Ignore Fact That Employees Often Have ‘Fundamental Differences of Interest’
In reporting on union-label politicians’ last-ditch effort to block enactment of a Michigan Right to Work law, pro-forced unionism Washington Post contributor Greg Sargent has just uncritically repeated a common, but outrageous Big Labor canard regarding the millions of American employees who choose not to join the union that wields monopoly-bargaining power over them.
Top Democrats in the Michigan congressional delegation, explains Mr. Sargent in a blog post today, urged GOP Gov. Rick Snyder in a meeting this morning to “consider vetoing . . . or postponing” a pending Right to Work measure that would prohibit the firing of employees for refusal to pay dues or fees to an unwanted union.
According to Mr. Sargent, Dems “argued to Snyder” that the campaign to pass a Right to Work law is “substantively unnecessary.”
They pointed out that workers are currently not required to join a union — and that they simply wanted to preserve the right of unions to collect fees from non-members to pay for wage and benefit negotiations that actually benefit them.
Part of this sentence is misleading, and the rest of it is false. Even in non-Right to Work states, workers who don’t wish to join a union do have a theoretical right to pay a forced “agency” fee instead. However, contrary to Mr. Sargent’s implication, union bosses can and often do spend forced fees extracted from nonmembers on politics and a range of other activities unrelated to bargaining. Under current federal law and the laws of many states, employees who want to stop a union they never joined from spending their forced fees on candidates they don’t support have an affirmative obligation to tell the union to cease and desist. Forced-unionism apologists actually defend this arrangement, suggesting it is unfair to suppose a worker doesn’t want to bankroll union politics with his forced fee money simply because he doesn’t want to join the union!
It is, to say the least, very disingenuous to suggest that under current law unions “only” collect fees from nonmembers to cover the cost of collective bargaining. But is simply a lie to say union nonmembers are “only” forced to pay “for wage and benefit negotiations that actually benefit them.”
In reality, of course, to collect forced fees Big Labor is under no obligation to furnish any proof that any union nonmember earns higher pay or gets better benefits as a consequence of being unionized. Moreover, a number of distinguished academic apologists for compulsory unionism have bluntly acknowledged over the years that many workers are actually economically harmed, rather than helped, by being corralled into union.
For example, Sheldon Leader, a professor of law at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom who has lectured at many universities in the U.S. and specializes in American as well as English labor law, has written an entire book (entitled Freedom of Association: A Study in Labor Law and Political Theory) that defends, as one reviewer explained, “giving priority to the union’s right to compel association over the individual’s right to dissociate . . . .”
Dr. Leader freely acknowledges what Mr. Sargent and his sources suppress or overlook: “[T]here are sometimes fundamental and not just occasional division of interest between majority (sic) and minorities covered by a particular collective bargain and by attendant representative institutions.” Under union monopoly bargaining, “the minority is often actually made worse off than it was before. For example, an agreement may provide that part-timers face liability to be fired in times of redundancy before full-timers, whereas before the agreement the rule may have been that the last hired was to be the first fired, applying equally to full and part-timers . . . .”
Obviously, part-timers in such cases have less job security under a union than they would if they were union-free, yet forced-unionism apologists like Mr. Sargent are nevertheless eager to force them to pay union fees for the “benefit” of being at greater risk of losing their jobs.
In addition to workers whose interests are flagrantly shortchanged by a union contract, Dr. Leader recognizes there are many other union nonmembers who are “sincerely motivated to dissociate by what they perceive to be the evil actions of the institutions in whose life they are forced to share.”
A key purpose of state Right to Work laws to mitigate the economic and other harm imposed on employees by forced association with a labor union. Such laws prevent greedy union officials from pouring salt in the wounds of force association by extracting compulsory dues from the employees who are harmed. That is the ugly reality Mr. Sargent and his sources cover up through misdirection and falsehood.