Conservatives have watched with no small amount of pleasure as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana – mainstays of American industry even today — have adopted right-to-work laws, which allow workers in unionized shops to choose for themselves whether they want to pay union dues. Still, there is much more to be done to restore workers’ freedom.
If conservatives genuinely want to restore a just balance between the rights of unions, employers and workers, right-to-work laws are good, but they’re just a Band-Aid on a very bad and anachronistic system of labor laws that needs to be revisited. The current laws on unionization were established during the Great Depression. States’ right-to-work option came a decade later, and it helped solve some of the problems of the original laws in the states that adopted it. But even in right-to-work states, workers can still be subjected to unwanted union representation (even if they refuse to pay for it), and the only way out for them is to run a time-intensive and thankless decertification campaign that often makes them the target of union harassment.
The real answer is a thorough reform of the underlying and aging labor laws. And the best vehicle for bringing that about at the moment is the Employee Rights Act, which was introduced in the last Congress by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., and will soon be reintroduced once again.
The bill was the subject of an ad during the 2014 Super Bowl, which demonstrated the value of workers’ privacy by depicting a series of men sitting on toilets that were out in the open in public spaces such as stores and parking lots. Some things, the ad argued, should be done in private — like voting on unionization, for example.
To that end, the bill would guarantee workers a secret ballot elections in all unionization drives, and also require secret-ballot votes by union members on whether a union is to order a strike. The latter reform would improve democracy within unions, whilst the former would curb union organizers’ and bosses’ ability to intimidate or harass workers who are opposed or unsure about unionization.
Union violence and threats would also be criminalized for the first time under ERA, including intimidation of members during union decertification elections. Crucially, the bill would require periodic recertification elections for all unions. This would mean that a union’s representation monopoly cannot live on through simple inertia (as often happens) years after all the employees who actually wanted and voted for the union are gone.
The Employee Rights Act would also require workers to opt in voluntarily before their unions can take and use their money for politics. It would also give them an opt-out for having employers share their personal information with unions.
Each of these measures represents a simple, common sense way to restore workers’ rights when it comes to their free choice to associate with labor unions. Reform in this area is long overdue, and it is good to see members of Congress involved again in making it happen.
