Unions Want UN Affiliate to Decide U.S. Labor Policy

Human Events, Nov 12, 2007 by Bandow, Doug

Of course, Americans can agree to disagree about unionization by TSA employees or North Carolina state workers. But who gets to make labor law-U.S. citizens or UN bureaucrats?

The ILO's Committee on Freedom of Association boasts that it has handled more than 2,300 cases over a half century. The LLO has a role to play when it draws attention to the policies of countries where workers have no rights, where unions are forbidden, strikes are banned, courts are subservient, speech is controlled and elections are rigged.

But that isn't the case in the United States. Indeed, the Democratic victories in 2006 show the political power of the U.S. labor movement. It's one thing to be oppressed. But U.S. labor unions have only been on the losing side of a political fight. It's too bad that the LLO and, more importantly, the AFL-CIO, can't tell die difference.

The labor federation apparently believes workers have nowhere to turn but to the ILO. In 2000, the AFL-CIO's website formally lauded the ILO: "Corporations continue to compete by exploitation-playing nations against one another-lowering wages, scrapping regulations, loosening environmental restrictions and creating a race to the bottom. Workers are unable to buy the goods and services they produce." This is an America few Americans would recognize.

America's Choices

Whether TSA workers should organize, who counts as a supervisor and whether North Carolina should allow its state employees to unionize-these issues should be decided in the U.S. by Americans-not by an unaccountable bureaucracy an ocean away.

If ILO staffers come calling, Americans should welcome mem warmly and inform them that the U.S. is a free country in which liberty runs both ways. Workers can choose to unionize. They also can choose not to unionize. Ultimately those choices will be decided by Americans in America.

Mr. Bandow, former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, is vice president of Policy for Citizen Outreach and author of the forthcoming Leviathan Unchained: Washington's Bipartisan Big Government Consensus. This article is reproduced from the November 2007 edition of Labor Watch, a Capital Research Center publication.