Does America need a national right-to-work law?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 17, 1998 | by Reed Larson, | William L. Clay

Yes: Roll back the unjust powers of union bosses and restore freedom to workers.

By Reed Larson Larson is president of the National Right to Work Committee, 2.1 million Americans who believe that employees must have the right to join, or not join, a union.

For the first time, union officials suddenly are being forced this summer to confront the idea that sometime in the near future they no longer will be able to force workers to pay union dues to keep their jobs.

And that has Big Labor terrified. Why? Because for more than 60 years union bosses have been able to rely on the forced-dues authority Congress granted them to collect tribute from workers. Without the ability to "strap their members to the mast" (to quote former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich), the more than 8 million captive American workers who are forced to pay dues as a condition of employment would be released from the iron grip of union officials.

The fact is, everyone should have the right to join a labor union, but no one should be forced to do so. However, union bosses seize more than $6 billion every year from private-sector workers, most of whom would be automatically fired if they didn't pay up.

Workers' freedom of choice was taken away by Congress when it placed provisions in the National Labor Relations Act and the Railway Labor Act handing union bosses the authority to take away workers' hard-earned wages.

The collection of forced union dues violates values we, as Americans, hold dear. In the words of one of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson: "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical." There is one simple way to end the forced-dues tyranny of Big Labor -- pass a national right-to-work law. The National Right to Work Act (HR59/S497), introduced in the House this year by Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and in the Senate by Republican Sen. Paul Coverdell of Georgia, would not add a single word to federal law. It only would remove the sections of federal law in which the federal government granted dictatorial forced-dues powers to union officials.

The National Right to Work Act simply would make forced union dues illegal. What would happen if Congress stripped away this power wielded by the union bosses? The right of an individual to form or join a union would be protected under federal law, and the right not to join or support a union would be restored.

The fathers of modern unionism never intended to compel membership from workers who did not want or ask for union representation. The founder of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, once said: "The workers of America adhere to voluntary institutions in preference to compulsory systems, which are not only impractical, but a menace to their welfare and their liberty."

Congress has given Big Labor the power to:

* Seize $6 billion every year from 8 million American workers;

* Corrupt our political system by spending billions of dollars of employees' money -- often against their will -- to install tax-and-spend radical politicians in Congress and the White House. These union-financed politicians strangle small businesses with confiscatory taxes, destructive laws and straitjacket regulations;

* Foment an "us vs. them/hate the boss" mentality in countless workplaces and instigate destructive strikes and work slowdowns.

The union bosses' compulsory-dues politicking, scorched-earth bargaining tactics and widespread use of violence have taken a great toll on the U.S. economy. Richard Rothstein, a research associate with the AFL-CIO funded Economic Policy Institute, unintentionally has acknowledged the economic harm done by compulsory unionism. In a 1993 article, Rothstein -- who supports forced unionism -- candidly wrote that union-negotiated employee contracts typically have the perverse effect of "reducing pay of the most productive workers" while increasing compensation for less productive workers. A system that grants union officials the legal power to foist unwanted, pay-cutting union representation on its most productive employees -- and then forces them to pay for it -- is a system in which, ultimately, the income and standard of living of all citizens are lessened.

Fortunately, 21 states already have right-to-work laws -- protecting more than 95 percent of the private-sector employees within their borders from the federal forced-dues policy -- and the economic benefits of right to work can be confirmed by their experience. In recent years, economists have completed a number of studies, using various methodologies, that calculate the after-tax, cost-of-living-adjusted incomes of citizens in each of the 50 states.

All of the studies, including one commissioned by Big Labor Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, show that, adjusted for cost of living and taxes, per capita and family income are significantly higher in right-to-work states. For example, a 1994 study by James Bennett, an economist at the Nobel Prize-winning economics department at George Mason University, found that in 1993 urban families in right-to-work states had an average spendable income more than $2,800 higher than that of urban families in forced-dues states.