On Thursday, Republicans will meet behind closed doors and hold a secret-ballot vote on who will represent their party later this month as the next Speaker of the House. Whomever they select, he should make it a priority to give workers the same kind of private choice.
The next speaker can do this by bringing to the floor the Employee Rights Act. This law, introduced over the summer by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., would reform outdated Depression-era labor laws and restore to workers the choice of whether they want union representation in the workplace.
Currently, states can at least reduce the economic burden of federal labor union policy and its imposition on employees’ personal freedom by adopting right-to-work laws. Three midwestern states have done so during the Obama presidency. In right-to-work states, workers cannot be forced to pay unions for representation they do not want and never asked for. Yet in most states, they can still be forced to accept that representation, thanks to the monopoly bargaining privileges granted to unions under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. More than one million U.S. workers currently find themselves with unwanted union representation.
What’s more, a union only has to win one election in order to establish itself in a workplace in perpetuity. Even if that election took place during the Eisenhower era, today’s workers are still bound by it unless they want to pick an ugly, public fight with the union bosses, whether their hope is to join a different union or to quit unionism altogether.
Even in workplaces where no or few current workers participated in the original vote for a union — as is the case for nearly 93 percent of union-represented workers — it is very difficult to replace or remove a union from its entrenched position.
The Employee Rights Act would change all of this. It would guarantee workers secret ballot unionization elections. It would also require periodic secret-ballot votes in the workplace on whether employees want to retain the union’s services. The bill would also require secret-ballot votes by union members on the question of whether to strike, and it would criminalize union violence and threats — including threats against workers who want to remove or replace their union.
The ERA would also require that workers opt-in to the use of their money for politics — something the Supreme Court may soon decide is their right anyway. Currently, in many states, unions can use members’ money for political advocacy unless the workers specify otherwise in writing.
With the rise of modern workplace safety and health standards, as well as fundamental paradigm shifts in how employment works, labor unions have lost their relevance for most American workers. This is why union membership has plummeted to just 12.3 percent of the workforce, and just 6.6 percent of the private sector workforce.
As more and more workers opt out of the labor movement and shed its political baggage, it only makes sense to re-evaluate whether unions should retain the special privileges created in laws that were drafted before computers had even been invented. The Employee Rights Act offers them just such an opportunity.
