Posted on 08/05/2014 11:09:29 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Right-to-work laws (RTW) constantly take criticism from Big Labor and its anti-market allies. Those laws are said to undermine all-important worker solidarity by permitting some workers to become “free riders” by not paying dues. Unions despise dissenters and have a long, nasty history of “dealing” with workers who want nothing to do with them.
Getting rid of RTW has been one of Big Labor’s political goals ever since the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 allowed states to enact laws against union security contracts, whereby workers must be fired if they don’t pay their dues. (Those efforts came very close to succeeding in 1966 and 1977, as I recount in my book Free Choice for Workers.)
Attacks on RTW from the anti-market left are old hat, but to hear an attack coming from libertarian and free-market quarters is rather unexpected. But in his recent article, “The Problem with Right-to-Work Laws,” Logan Albright (Director of Fiscal Research at Capital Policy Analytics) contends that those of us who oppose government intervention in the economy should also oppose RTW laws.
He writes, “Free-market advocates must ask whether these laws are the right way to reduce government power, and whether they satisfy the moral and ethnical criteria at the root of free-market and libertarian thought. Is it right to restrict the freedom to contract in order to counteract existing restrictions on the same freedom?”
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Abolish the minimum wage! Fight communism and unionism! Restore American prosperity! Woo hoo!
Brave New World
The proper Libertarian position on Labor Unions is that any worker should be free to voluntarily JOIN such an organization, as long as there was perceived benefit to that individual, and that the same employee should be free to LEAVE that organization, if any such benefit(s) ceased to exist.
Employers would be free to BARGAIN with such an organization, if they saw an advantage to do so, or to SEEK LABOR elsewhere, if no such advantage existed.
It should not be enshrined in law that you MUST deal with a specific supplier of product, service or labor in a free market.
What a moron.
I worked in ‘closed shop states’.
The ‘right to work’ law, is the correct one.
Where I worked it was THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF MACHINISTS, (and aerospace workers). Never did I see such a wasteful bunch of idiots, including the union meetings I did attend.
As a federal employee, you HAD to join the ASSOCIATION OF FEDERAL AND GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES union, or you didn’t work there. Another bunch of wasteful idiots.
Ace I do not know if the author is indeed a moron but your statement other wise is SPOT ON !
Exactly. Compelling employers to deal with a particular union because they were once a powerful enough cartel to compel them to do so would be like compelling a gas station to buy from OPEC because OPEC used to be the only game in town.
If there were no labor unions, there would be no need for right to work laws. I say that as someone who literally wants as small a federal government as is absolutely practical—bare minimum, as the Framers intended. I fully support the Framers’ vision of limited government for our republic. No one has a “right” to work. These laws ought to be called “right to avoid union thuggery and bullying in the workplace” laws.
Unfortunately, we have labor unions and their incredibly wealthy enablers, whose tactics are, at best, thuggish and underhanded. Because of this, and until we can return to a market economy as envisioned by the Framers, with minimal government regulation and intervention, we have to work within the established system to fight them.
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