Media bias, as my colleague Becket Adams so skillfully and regularly points out, is as much about what isn’t said as what is.
In that regard, I was particularly struck this week by the near-total absence of skeptical coverage on Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., stated intention to ban the increasingly popular “right-to-work” laws governing states across the nation. Apart from the Wall Street Journal, I am unable to find editorials or opinion pieces that challenge Harris’s intentions. Considering the many editorials that follow President Trump’s more outrageous actions, this represents clear bias.
It shouldn’t stand. The Democratic presidential candidate is pledging something very unpleasant. She’s saying that you shouldn’t necessarily get a job unless you first kneel, and continue to kneel, to a union boss, sacrificing a portion of your paycheck. That’s the translation of what a federal law banning right-to-work laws would actually entail. Right-to-work laws simply mean that you are free to choose whether to join a union — your paying the union cannot be made a condition of your employment. And thanks to the Supreme Court’s apt reading of the Constitution in Janus, public sector workers can no longer be compelled to pay union dues as a condition of their employment.
Harris wants to undo this, to subjugate workers to union bosses and make them fund union political activities that benefit Democrats. This isn’t just immoral, it is foul in its measure and meaning. And it deserves far more scrutiny than the casual reporting that it has met.
My gripe here isn’t simply that Harris would destroy freedom at the altar of union power, but that unions have repeatedly shown they are bad for society. My primary concern here is the way in which unions prioritize political and in some cases member interests ahead of those they are supposed to serve. Take the Los Angeles teachers union, for example — are its actions good for students? Not at all.
As with most Democratic 2020 offers of better governance, the model seems to be France, where union power has turned the economy into a welfare-dependent maelstrom of inefficiencies. In such societies as the one they envision, it is the young, the poor, and minorities who suffer most, even though for the moment a majority of those voter classes favor Democrats.
