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  • Unions Are Clearly in the Wrong about Freedom of Association

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Unions have long justified themselves as exemplars of the right of freedom of association. Brenda Smith of the American Federation of Teachers said:

    Exclusivity for a union with majority support…is democracy…It allows them to amplify their voice through collective action under our constitutionally protected right to freedom of association.

    However, unions deprive many of their freedom of association. As the Supreme Court found in Janus, unions inflict a “significant impingement on associational freedoms that would not be tolerated in other contexts.”

    This glaring inconsistency is highlighted by the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act that Democrats have recently introduced and are expected to pass in the House. It is, as Eric Boehm described it, a “veritable grab bag of policies that labor unions have been pushing Congress to pass for years.” And that grab bag would further advantage unions at the expense of others’ freedom of association.

    It would require employers to provide private employee information (including cell phone numbers, email addresses, and work schedules) to union organizers, violating the associational rights of those who don’t want to join or be approached by unions. It would allow unions to initiate snap elections in non-union workplaces more rapidly, limiting opponents’ ability to present opposing positions. And it would codify “card check” elections, eliminating the protections against coercion provided by a secret ballot.

    Such violations of others’ freedoms of association in the name of union rights highlight the need to recognize that cognitive dissonance.

    Union “rights” delete workers’ freedom to associate with a different union, to choose alternative forms of group representation, such as voluntary unions, and to represent themselves in negotiations with employers. They delete workers’ freedom to associate with non-union employers or to resolve workplace issues directly with employers, forcing arrangements exclusively through unions.

    They delete employers’ freedom to not associate with unions or to solely employ workers who have no union involvement. In heavily unionized industries, they undermine consumers’ freedom to associate with lower cost, non-union producers and force taxpayers to face higher cost government services as a result of government employee unions. In each of these ways, freedom of association is applied only as a special privilege for unions and denied to others.

    Further, it must be recognized that unions violate the most basic freedom of association of many current union members. Many have never been given the right to vote on unionization, and those who might try are often knee-capped.

    As James Sherk has documented, not a single current worker in many unions ever voted to select that union, and vanishingly few current workers voted for them in other instances. That destroys any claim that the union advances their current workers’ freedom of association.

    Labor law requires only a majority of those who voted (not a majority of the workers) in a single certification election to allow unions to impose exclusive union representation on all workers. No further elections need ever be held. So new workers need never be given a vote on the union, and anyone who changes their mind need never be given a new chance.

    That means that in workplaces unionized long ago, virtually no one who now works there voted to certify the union. Which current workers voted for UAW unionization of GM’s Michigan plants in 1937? Which current government union workers voted to certify their unions in the 1960s and 70s? Current union members have therefore often had no effective input on who represents them. They have been denied the only freedom of association plausibly consistent with unions’ freedom of association claims.

    Some of the restrictions on workers’ freedom of association due to unionization could be addressed by having regular union certification elections. Decertification elections are also possible. But unions have managed to hamstring both options, revealing that workers’ freedom of association was an intended victim, not their intended motive.

    Union members can try to change their union representatives in internal elections if they are unhappy with the current leadership. But even if they successfully oust their leadership, since the local is subordinate to the national union, the national one can neutralize it by putting the local one under its trusteeship and leadership. So even when unhappy workers “win,” they can lose.

    Unions never offer regularly occurring union certification elections, either, despite being supported by more than four out of five union households. And when such elections have been forced on them, as when Wisconsin required government unions to face re-certification elections, union members often said “no.” Many unions did not even file for re-election, revealing how badly they had served members. In other cases, membership fell dramatically, or dues had to be cut to hold onto those who would otherwise defect.

    Decertification is also strewn with restrictions. It requires signatures from 30 percent of all employees in a unit (versus 50 percent of votes cast for certification, which can be a far lower hurdle), within a one-month time frame that is only open once every three years, and those signatures cannot be gathered while employees are being paid or in work areas. Further, union members who support decertification are commonly expelled from the union (but not relieved of paying for their “representation services”), giving them still less freedom of association. Such restrictions make decertification a faulty escape valve for poorly represented workers.

    In sum, not only do unions deny others’ freedom of association, they straightjacket their own members’ most essential guarantee of freedom of association and have made it all but impossible to undo the abuse. If freedom of association is a right we all have, as unions’ self-justifications claim, then current unions are clearly in the wrong and pushing further in the wrong direction.


    Gary M. Galles

    Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. His recent books include Faulty Premises, Faulty Policies (2014) and Apostle of Peace (2013). He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • We May Finally See the End of Compulsory Union Dues

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    By the end of next month, public-sector employee unions will be up to their eyeballs in the orgy of obfuscation sure to accompany the U.S. Supreme Court’s consideration of a case that could once and for all strip organized labor of its power to skim dollars from the paychecks of virtually every government worker in the state.

    The Case as It Stands

    And at the end of the day, the torrent of words will distill down to two basic propositions. Either the union leaders:

    • honestly believe they know better than the workers themselves what’s in their best interests; or
    • couldn’t care less about what’s best for the workers, and this whole exercise is nothing more than a brazen attempt to preserve the monopoly over the public labor supply unions bought and paid for generations ago with someone else’s money.

    The plaintiffs in Janus v. AFSCME argue that being forced to financially support a union’s ideals amounts to suppression of their First Amendment rights, and no one should have to check their right to free speech at the door as a condition of employment in the government.

    The unions counter that wages in states that lack so-called “right-to-work” legislation tend to be higher than in those that do. But that reasoning assumes all the other economic variables in California and, say, Mississippi are otherwise comparable and right-to-work is the only possible explanation for the cost-of-living disparity.

    The Realities of Compulsion

    Moreover, it falsely assumes the average taxpayer considers it his or her patriotic duty to overpay for a commodity — in this case, labor — that can be obtained cheaper elsewhere. It’s a good deal for the handful of union workers who benefit from artificially inflated wages, but it’s no great honor for the rest of us — whose paychecks are typically the product of actual market forces rather than union coercion and collusion — to overcompensate a politically well-connected special interest.

    What the unions never get around to telling you is that absolutely nothing in right-to-work legislation or the Janus ruling would compel workers to leave their union or prevent new recruits from joining. It simply leaves the choice to the individual, as it should be.

    When unions demand mandatory dues and fees, they’re tacitly admitting the service they provide in return isn’t valued by enough workers to make it economically viable. Likewise, when they insist government employee wages would plummet in the absence of a union, they’re simply confirming the workers are already earning more than their labors are actually worth on the open market.

    These are the kinds of hard economic truths that will be exposed when Janus is finally heard next month and the injustices that will be righted if the court this summer votes to ban mandatory dues and fees in the public sector.

    No wonder the union spin machine is already working overtime.


    Jeff Rhodes

    Jeff Rhodes is the managing editor for the Freedom Foundation, a Pacific Northwest-based free-market think tank whose legal team has submitted two amicus briefs in support of the plaintiffs in Janus v. AFSCME.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Labor Unions Are Now Filing Grievances Against Goats

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Labor Unions Are Now Filing Grievances Against Goats

    A major union is rallying its supporters to battle the latest job-stealing enemy: goats.

    The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the University of Michigan have had a well-established working relationship with each other for years. But this is largely because the labor union holds a contract with the school, barring it from hiring non-AFSCME members for various positions. Landscaping is among the many career fields supported by the union and is actually at the center of this latest controversy.

    While the university has traditionally employed AFSCME landscapers to tend to the school’s outdoor grass-trimming needs during the summer, the school has —albeit on accident— gone a different route this season and union members are anything but pleased.

    Blame It on the Livestock

    Tasked with clearing poisonous brush and overgrown vegetation that is both extremely difficult for humans to remove and all the more plentiful in the summer months, the university decided to utilize goats to get the job done. Renting a team of 20 goats from local residents, the livestock were expected to complete the 15-acre clearing job before students returned to campus in the fall.

    But the goats exceeded all expectations and instead of completing the job by the end of the summer, they fulfilled their task in a matter of weeks. Since the goats had been rented for the season and were still in the care of the university, they were allowed to graze on campus property after they had finished clearing the overgrowth. While this was not the campus’ original intent, this grazing allowed the goats to feed themselves while the university received a cost-effective lawn mowing service on campus. But not all parties saw this cheap labor as a win/win for the campus community.

    As animals, the goats themselves were not privy to the terms of the AFSCME’s contract with the school and made the grave error of eating grass that existed outside of the designated 15-acre clearing area. Unfortunately, trimming grass on campus property is a job-protected in the labor union’s contract with the university, making these goats “scabs” in the eyes of the AFSCME.

    In a recent grievance filed against the university, the union asserts that “goat crews” on campus have jeopardized the livelihood of its members, specifically its landscapers who are currently out of work. The union claims that these animals have effectively stolen employment opportunities from its members since the goats have essentially offered the same service but at a much lower cost. As a result, the AFSCME believes that the school is in violation of its collective bargaining contract with the union and has sought legal action.

    The union’s president, Dennis Moore, commented on the matter saying, “AFSCME takes protecting the jobs of its members very seriously and we have an agreed-upon collective bargaining agreement with Western Michigan.” He continued, “We expect the contract to be followed, and in circumstances where we feel it’s needed, we file a grievance.”

    The university’s spokesperson, Cheryl Roland, responded to this by explaining that, “For the second summer in a row, we’ve brought in a goat crew to clear undergrowth in a woodlot, much of it poison ivy and other vegetation that is a problem for humans to remove. Not wanting to use chemicals, either, we chose the goat solution to stay environmentally friendly.” Roland also added, “The area is rife with poison ivy and other invasive species, and our analysis showed the goats to be a sustainable and cost-effective way of removing them.”

    But as ridiculous as this entire debacle is, and it is surely ridiculous, these claims are anything but new. Competition is the enemy of coercive labor unions, who have always depended on the long arm of the state to prop up their monopoly over certain sectors. This is as true today as it was in the 19th century when protectionism in France was becoming all the more common.

    The Candle Makers

    In Frederic Bastiat’s brilliant satirical essay, “Candlestick Makers’ Petition,” he uses hyperbole to highlight the absurdity of the claims espoused by the AFSCME, well over a century before Michigan’s “goatgate” even began.

    Written in 1845 as an open letter to French Parliament, Bastiat penned the essay on behalf of the “Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting.” The grievances contained in his essay were aimed at the enemy of all those in the “light business”: the sun.

    “We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price,” Bastiat writes. He then calls upon Parliament to remedy this unfair competition by asking for the following:

    “We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.”

    In a not-so-subtle jab aimed at members of French Parliament who often pretended to support consumers by instituting monopolies for their “own well-being” Bastiat says:

    “You no longer have the right to invoke the interests of the consumer. You have sacrificed him whenever you have found his interests opposed to those of the producer. You have done so in order to encourage industry and to increase employment. For the same reason, you ought to do so this time to

    Bastiat’s “Candlemaker’s Petition” was a satirical exaggeration to make a point: imagining producers asking the government for protection against competition offered by a part of nature. Yet today, we have a union earnestly doing exactly that in real life. 21st-century reality has become more absurd than 19th-century satire.


    Brittany Hunter

    Brittany Hunter is an associate editor at FEE. Brittany studied political science at Utah Valley University with a minor in Constitutional studies.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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