New York University Law Professor Ignores the Facts in Anti-Right to Work Diatribe
‘Right to work’ is a misnomer
Pro-forced unionism academic Samuel Estreicher evidently believes that the freedom of association of employees who don’t wish to join a union is less deserving of legal protection than the freedom of association of employees who do wish to join. If that’s the case, he should at least explain why, instead of dodging the facts. Image: law.nju.edu.cn
The shock waves sent out by longtime forced-unionism stronghold Michigan’s enactment of America’s 24th state Right to Work law in December are still reverberating. A growing number of apologists for Big Labor in the media and in academia are responding to this development, which they didn’t expect and certainly didn’t welcome, by publicly reaffirming their virulent opposition to Right to Work laws, which simply make it illegal to fire employees for refusal to pay dues or fees to an unwanted union.
Unfortunately, in vigorously denouncing what happened in Michigan in December 2012 (and Indiana’s approval of the 23rd state Right to Work just 10 months earlier), union-label journalists and academics routinely ignore facts opponents of forced unionism have cited again and again. To refute them, therefore, requires repeating oneself time and again.
The latest example is the brief anti-Right to Work diatribe by New York University law professor Samuel Estreicher published on the web site of the National Law Journal January 7. (See the link above.)
Estreicher starts out with the Big Labor boilerplate contention that Right to Work laws aren’t necessary, because the individual employee’s freedom not to join a union is already protected under federal law.
The truth is that the “protection†federal law furnishes for private-sector employees’ personal freedom not to join a union is largely nominal, rather than genuine, and people like Estreicher would be the first to say so if the shoe were on the other foot.
Under federal law, the individual right to join and financially support a union isn’t contingent on what a majority of the front-line employees at a workplace think or what the employer thinks. Even if most employees don’t want a union, and the employer doesn’t want one, either, the individual employee is free to join and pay dues to support the union’s organizing efforts and its political activities as well.
What if federal law were changed so that the individual pro-union employee in a workplace where a majority of the employees and the employer opposed unionization retained the nominal freedom to join a union, but lost the freedom to pay dues to support union organizing? I put forth that Estreicher would be among the first to declare, correctly, that the freedom to join a union had been stripped of nearly all meaningful protection under the law. The nominal right to join a union, when it isn’t accompanied by the right to support that union financially, is a sham.
Yet Estreicher apparently thinks that it is fine that federal law protects the nominal right to refuse to join a union, but explicitly authorizes union contracts forcing employees to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment.
If that is indeed Estreicher’s stance, he at least owes it to his readers to explain why he believes the freedom of association of employees who don’t wish to join a union is deserving of less protection under the law than the freedom of association of employees who do wish to join.
Instead, in his National Law Journal piece, he chose to misrepresent federal policy concerning compulsory unionism and the Right to Work.
The gaping problem described above is far from the only one in Estreicher’s very short article. But the public debate over Right to Work laws would be improved immeasurably if apologists for compulsory unionism like Estreicher at least acknowledged that they would never accept it if federal law protected the freedom to join a union as feebly as it currently “protects†the freedom not to join.