The conservative Mackinac Center is proposing a fix to right-to-work laws that would address organized labor’s complaint that the laws create an unfair burden on them.
“The policy outlined in this paper — ‘Worker’s Choice’ — would release employees from unwanted union representation and relieve unions from providing services to so-called free/forced riders,” wrote Mackinac lawyer Vincent Vernuccio in a paper released Monday.
Right-to-work laws say that a worker cannot be forced to join a union or otherwise support it financially as a condition of employment. Most union contracts with management include provisions requiring that condition, but 25 states have passed prohibitions on the practice. Three of the 25 states, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin, have adopted the laws in the last three years.
Unions argue that such provisions — called a “security clause” or “closed shop” rule — is necessary because federal law requires they represent all workers in a private-sector workplace. Public-sector unions, which are mostly governed by state law, typically face the same requirement. Without the security clause, they face the economic problem of “free riders” — people who pay the union nothing but then get the benefits of its services.
In a 2013 lawsuit against Michigan’s then-recently enacted right-to-work law, a Teamsters local argued the law was “a violation of the prohibitions against involuntary servitude” because its members were forced to work on behalf of nonunion members.
Vernuccio agrees that the unions have a legitimate complaint and says that releasing them from the requirement would benefit them by relieving them of the added costs. It also would help unions by giving workers an incentive to remain members to retain their union benefits. Workers who refused to join would be complete free agents, responsible for negotiating their own pay and benefits.
The paper focuses on public-sector unions because making the change would be easier at that level. A change in federal labor law, which covers private-sector unions, would require an amendment to the National Labor Relations Act.
“It is probably much easier to start at the state level, but this could be applied to the NLRA. However, politically that is probably not feasible with the current environment in Washington,” Vernuccio said. Unions are unlikely to be supportive since they oppose right-to-work laws generally and would rather scrap them than fix them.
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, did not see Vernuccio’s proposal as a good solution, since it “doesn’t account for what the goal of collective bargaining is: to strengthen the workers’ hand … He is proposing to fragment that power.” He added that the acknowledgement that right to work creates a free rider issue was “at least a step in the right direction.”
