Will Famously Garrulous Leftist Noam Chomsky Elaborate on Why He Supports Forced Union Dues?

For decades, Big Labor bosses have sought to perpetuate and expand upon their special legal privileges to get workers fired for refusal to join or bankroll a union they don’t want, and never asked for, by impugning the motives of such workers.

This is the very tactic adopted by veteran leftist Noam Chomsky, perhaps best known for his intense public skepticism regarding “unreliable” refugee witnesses’ reports in the mid-1970’s that Communist Pol Pot and his cohorts were committing murder on a massive scale, in a Tucson interview posted on The Nation magazine’s web site.  (See the link below for Salon’s account, which will also direct you to the interview itself.)

Union bigwigs and their ideological fellow travelers, including Chomsky, are galled by the fact that, in the 25 Right to Work states, employees who refuse to join the union that wields monopoly-bargaining power in their workplace can thereby refuse to pay dues or fees to that union.

The primary motivation for many employees to resist bankrolling their union monopoly-bargaining agent is their belief that the union hierarchy is acting contrary to their economic interests.  Union propagandists typically pretend otherwise.

Over and over again, they have insinuated that the vast majority of, if not all, employees in Right to Work states who exercise their legal prerogative to refuse to pay dues or fees to an unwanted union actually approve of what the union is doing.

Chomsky, for example, sneered at workers who supposedly treasure the “right to be represented by a union to defend you” but nevertheless opt “not to pay for it.”

Unfortunately for Chomsky and his ilk, early last year prominent union lawyer Paul Smith effectively acknowledged that, in reality, this rationalization for forced union dues is nothing but a hollow pretense and, in reality, many workers have solid grounds for believing they are economically harmed by union monopoly bargaining.

Smith represented Service Employees International Union (SEIU) bosses in the case Harris v. Quinn. At oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in January 2014, he was pushed into a corner thanks to the persistent questioning of Justice Sam Alito.

(In Harris v. Quinn, Big Labor sought unsuccessfully to get a constitutional green light to extract forced fees from home care providers who aren’t government or business employees. The care providers were represented free of charge by National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation attorneys.)

At one point, the justice brought up the example, well-grounded in reality, of a teacher union that opposes merit pay and any change in the tenure system, and a teacher who is not a union member and “disagrees completely with the union on these issues.”

Even though the teacher is not a union member, continued Alito, he “still has to pay a pretty hefty agency fee, maybe $700 a year. So the teacher is paying this money to the union to make an argument to the employer with which the teacher completely disagrees.” Alito subsequently asked Smith what he would say to such an employee.

Smith then had no choice but to insist that the forced-dues “requirement is an appropriate thing which a public employer is allowed to impose” on employees who are harmed by a union as well as those who may be helped.

What about Noam Chomsky? Does he think the law ought to authorize union officials to force, with the government’s help, employees to pay dues or fees for detrimental union-boss “representation”?

If so, he should say so bluntly, instead of hiding behind the false and preposterous assumption that all workers subject to union monopoly bargaining benefit thereby.

If not, Chomsky should retract his opposition to Right to Work laws.

In the past, when I have posed them with such a choice, other intellectual proponents of forced unionism have not offered any response.  But the notoriously garrulous Chomsky is well-known for responding to virtually all public criticism of his views.

Therefore, the National Institute for Labor Relations Research is cautiously hopeful that, once this blog post is forwarded to Chomsky, he will either elaborate on why he supports forced union dues, or back off from that support. The author eagerly awaits learning what Chomsky has to say.

Last year, a union lawyer tacitly acknowledged to the U.S. Supreme Court that many workers have solid grounds for believing they are economically harmed by union monopoly bargaining. Yet venerable leftist Noam Chomsky, like many other forced-unionism apologists, seems simply to assume that employees who refuse to pay union dues actually approve of what the union is doing. Image: Graham Gordon Ramsay

Noam Chomsky blasts the assault on labor: “’Right to work’ means ‘right to scrounge’†– Salon.com