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.