All eyes are on Wisconsin today to see whether Governor Scott Walker’s budget and public-sector union reforms will be validated by the voting public. I applaud Walker’s reforms. But his reforms should be just the first step. Virginia took the next step two decades ago and completely repealed collective bargaining in the public sector.
I happened to hear conservative radio talker Chris Plante this morning discussing his support of Walker, but saying something like “But I’m not against collective bargaining rights in either the private sector or the public sector.”
Too many conservatives, and maybe even some libertarians, seem to buy the labor union line that collective bargaining is somehow a fundamental “right,” like the freedom of speech. It isn’t. Collective bargaining in both the private and government sectors is monopoly unionism. It represents a violation of the freedom of association.
Here’s what Charles Baird says on www.DownsizingGovernment.org:
The ideas embodied in the federal union laws of the 1930s make no sense in today’s dynamic economy. Luckily, constant change and innovation in the private sector has relegated compulsory unionism to a fairly small area of U.S. industry. But the damage done by federal union legislation is still substantial. Many businesses and industries have likely failed or gone offshore because of the higher costs and inefficiencies created by federal union laws, while other businesses may not have expanded or opened in the first place. So the damage of today’s union laws is substantial, but often unseen, in terms of the domestic jobs and investment that the laws have discouraged.
Davis-Bacon, the Norris-LaGuardia Act, and the National Labor Relations Act serve the particular interests of unionized labor rather than the general interests of all labor. These laws abrogate one of the most important privileges and immunities of American citizens—the rights of individual workers to enter into hiring contracts with willing employers on terms that are mutually acceptable. …
The principle of exclusive representation [collective bargaining], as provided for in the NLRA, should be repealed. Workers should be free on an individual basis to hire a union to represent them or not represent them. They should not be forced to do so by majority vote. Unions are private associations, not governments. For government to tell workers that they must allow a union to represent them is for government to violate workers’ freedom of association. Restrictions on the freedom of workers to choose who represents them should be eliminated.
