The 2016 election provided Republicans with an immense opportunity to govern and to demonstrate that their policies work. Between President Trump’s unexpected victory and GOP dominance on the state and federal levels, the chances for reform legislation abounded.
One early opportunity we identified was to reform the 83-year-old regimen of labor laws, which are obsolete for workers, who are their supposed beneficiaries, and survive only as a political weapon for the Left. We pointed out, for example, that workers’ freedom of association is seriously restricted by current law, something the Supreme Court confirmed this year when it forbade closed shops and compulsory union membership for government workers.
Congressional Republicans had the solution in their hands, the Employee Rights Act, and they had ample opportunity to advance it, to their own great political advantage. That’s why it is especially dispiriting, not to mention galling, that they have utterly failed to advance this excellent legislation. Republicans now plan on going into the 2018 midterm elections without even marking up the ERA in committee.
The bill would right many wrongs that Depression-era labor law inflicts on workers who live in the very different world of today.
- By guaranteeing secret-ballot union elections, the ERA would reduce union intimidation in the workplace.
- By forcing unions to submit to periodic recertification elections in workplaces, the ERA would prevent workers being stuck with union representation that few if any of them approved. More than 90 percent of union-represented workers never had the chance to vote for or against their union. That allows lots of bad representation to continue by default, but union bosses love it because it means they don’t have to work for their pay.
- The ERA would require employees’ affirmative consent for their money to be spent on politics.
- It would formally criminalize union threats and violence.
What exactly is objectionable in any of this? How could it not be helpful for Republicans to force Democrats to put themselves on the record and vote against workers’ freedom of choice?
Republican failure on the ERA demonstrates a cowardice rather than courage in conservative convictions. At stake are freedom of association, free enterprise, and even freedom of speech, because unions continue to take money from workers while keeping them in the dark about their rights not to be misrepresented by invariably far-left union political activism.
There is still time for Republicans to mend their timidity and lassitude this fall to move this legislation, which would force a debate on employee freedom, and could bring the promise of real betterment for workers before voters cast their ballots in November.
It’s the right thing to do both as a matter of principle, and as an electoral calculation.
