New Hampshire Democratic Gubernatorial Nominee Totally Wrong About Right to Work Laws
Maggie’s statement on the “Right to Work” vote – Maggie Hassan …
Maggie Hassan has offered an array of unconvincing reasons why New Hampshire' s elected officials should perpetuate Big Labor's special privilege to get employees fired for refusal to pay dues or fees to a union they didn't ask for, and don't want. (Photo: soundcloud.com)
Over the years, union-label politician Maggie Hassan, formerly the state Senate majority leader and now the 2012 Democratic gubernatorial nominee, has tried again and again to justify her opposition to grass-roots efforts to make New Hampshire a Right to Work state.  Ms. Hassan has offered an array of unconvincing reasons why New Hampshire’s elected officials should disregard the views of the overwhelming majority of the state’s citizens and perpetuate Big Labor’s special privilege to get employees fired for refusal to pay dues or fees to a union they didn’t ask for, and don’t want.  (See the first link above for a very recent example.)
Particularly egregious is Ms. Hassan’s contention that compulsory unionism as enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) three-quarters of a century ago “helped create the middle class.†(See the second link above.) The reality is that the pro-union monopoly provisions in the NLRA helped strangle a nascent economic recovery.
By the mid-1930’s, the U.S. economy appeared to be climbing out of the Great Depression. The number of unemployed, 13 million in 1933, dropped to 9.5 million in 1935 and 7.6 million in 1936. Then, in 1937, employees and employers alike were ravaged by what is often called “a depression within a depression.†Joblessness skyrocketed. A principal factor in the 1937 meltdown was the U.S. Supreme Court’s surprise 5-4 decision in early April to uphold the constitutionality of the NLRA, which had passed two years earlier. This statute, which is still the basis of federal labor-relations law, empowered union officials to act as employees’ monopoly-bargaining agents and to extract dues from all employees subject to union contracts, like it or not.
Within a few months after the NLRA was upheld, industrial production began to plummet and, as writer Amity Shlaes observed in her acclaimed history of the Great Depression, “the jobs started to disappear, with unemployment moving back up to 1931 levels,†even as the number of workers under union control was “growing astoundingly.†Pre-Depression-era growth and prosperity did not return to the private sector until the early 1950’s, when the spread of state Right to Work laws prohibiting forced union membership and dues greatly reduced the detrimental effects of the NLRA.
Lots of things have changed since the mid-20th Century, but the negative correlation between compulsory unionism and growth in private-sector jobs and pay is even more obvious now than it was then. From 2001 to 2011, private-sector employee compensation (including wages, salaries, benefits and bonuses) as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis grew by an average of 12.0%, after adjusting for inflation, in the 22 states that then had Right to Work laws on the books. That’s nearly double the nationwide increase and quadruple the average gain for forced-unionism states.
Sixteen of the 17 bottom-ranking states for compensation growth over the past decade lacked Right to Work laws at the time. Forced-unionism New Hampshire, which came in 36th out of the 50 states, lagged behind 21 of the 22 Right to Work states. (Indiana became the 23rd Right to Work state just this year.)
The primary reason for enacting a state Right to Work law is simple equity. Under current federal law and state laws across the country, the individual employee is free to join a union if he wishes, regardless of what his employer and fellow employees think. But except in Right to Work states it’s legal to force an individual employee who doesn’t want to join a union to pay union dues or fees, or face termination. The vast majority of New Hampshire citizens agree that’s not fair. They think the freedom not to join a union deserves just as much legal protection as the freedom to join. And majorities in both chambers of the New Hampshire Legislature and GOP gubernatorial nominee Ovide Lamontagne share that view.
It’s Ms. Hassan’s prerogative to support monopolistic unionism if she wishes. But she owes it to the voters to give them a genuine explanation for her position, instead of resorting to Big Labor fairy tales like her claim that the coercive and job-killing NLRA has boosted working Americans’ incomes.