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As we say goodbye to the summer season by celebrating Labor Day, most Americans are eager to recognize the ingenuity and determination of rank-and-file workers.
But not union bosses, who hijack the holiday every year to argue for more government-granted coercive powers. Instead of focusing on the workers they claim to represent, union officials wield political clout to protect and expand their privileged positions.
This is because today’s unions are built on the government-authorized ability to compel workers into their ranks. In the 24 states without right-to-work laws, union chiefs can legally extort private sector workers to “pay up or be fired.” Even when union membership is voluntary, workers must accept the union bargaining collectively for their wages and working conditions.
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It doesn’t matter that you, as an individual employee, may not want the union’s so-called representation or a one-size-fits-all contract; union bureaucrats can forcibly take your dues money, then use it to buy political influence or advocate causes you oppose.
Workers do still have some limited rights guaranteed under federal law, such as the right to have union dues not pay for political activities (CWA v. Beck, 1988) or the right of public employees not to be forced to pay any money to a government union (Janus v. AFSCME, 2018). But, union political operatives are using their influence — bought with workers’ dues money collected under duress — to try to push through a legislative agenda that upends these rights.
For example, the Protecting the Right to Work Act (PRO Act), Big Labor’s top legislative priority in Congress, would repeal all current 26 state Right to Work laws by federal fiat. Even though Right to Work laws don’t stop a single worker from joining a union or paying dues voluntarily, they’ve made it their signature move to end this protection for good.
Why? Because union bosses want to strip rank-and-file workers of their choice. This becomes all the more obvious as you examine the PRO Act’s other provisions, which codify several suspect or downright illegal tactics union enforcers already use to get around workers’ rights.
One such tactic is the controversial “card check” method of organizing a union, which avoids the traditional secret ballot that lets workers have the final say. Instead, this process lets organizers submit union cards collected in person from workers, often using pressure or intimidation tactics. The AFL-CIO even admitted in its own organizing handbook that such cards don’t reflect workers’ actual wishes.
To protect existing unions from decertification (secret-ballot votes to remove an incumbent union), the PRO Act codifies another common Big Labor tactic. Through union-filed blocking charges — unproven allegations against the company of unfair practices — union officials can unilaterally block decertification votes for months or more.
In multiple cases, such tactics were used to block decertification votes from occurring even though 100% of workers signed the decertification petition. Workers can literally be unanimously opposed to the union, yet union officials can manipulate their special legal powers to trap workers against their will.
It’s the latest sign that today’s union officials have fully rejected the warnings of some early union officials who wanted to build their organizations without coercing workers into their ranks.
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Take Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labor (now the AFL-CIO). In a 1924 speech to union delegates he forcefully rejected the coercion today’s union bosses rely on: “I want to urge devotion to the fundamentals of human liberty — the principles of voluntarism. No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.”
Gompers understood, as do the 8 in 10 Americans who oppose forced union dues and affiliation, that when union affiliation and financial support are voluntary, union officials must prove their worth to individual workers. But today, union bosses increasingly reject this ideal, and undermine the liberty of those they claim to “represent.”
So this Labor Day, remember that truly being “pro-worker” means rejecting the propaganda from union bosses and respecting a worker’s right to choose whether they want to join a union.
After all, it’s Labor Day, not Union Day.
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