Unions are in trouble across America. According to the latest LRI Online data , in the first five months of 2011 unions filed over 15% FEWER petitions to represent private-sector workers than they did in the same period in 2010 (and its not like 2010 was some kind of banner year for organizing). Their public sector problems have also been highly publicized. So unions are doing the only thing they know: getting the government to bail them out. Rumor has it that the DOL will issue its new rules on “persuader” consultants next week. These rules will attempt to choke off employer free speech during union organizing campaigns and give unions and the DOL another way to harass an employer who has the audacity to exercise its rights under the NLRA and the first amendment to state its position on unions. The NLRB is doing the same thing. Their rulings on bannering and rat-balloons allow unions to go after secondary employers with a vengeance, discouraging primary employers from exercising their free speech rights for fear of losing customers in this fragile economy. In addition the NLRB attack on Boeing (and other employers) threatens them with the loss of billions of dollars of capital investment (not to mention thousands of jobs) for so much as breathing the idea that they may want to locate its business somewhere that it might actually achieve some sort of labor peace. States are also passing rules banning employers from holding mandatory meetings where they discuss politics or religion (these laws of course cover meetings where an employer talks about unions, although they aren’t clear about whether that is politics or religion – I’d argue both). Not surprisingly the NLRB’s General Counsel is making no effort to stop enforcement of these clearly preempted statutes at the same time he is going around the country fighting state laws guaranteeing employees the right to vote in union elections. In an Orwellian (or Randian) twist, all these efforts are being made in the name of “workers rights” and freedom of association. But these efforts could not be less about the freedom to associate. The ironic thing about union calls for workers rights is that they only seem to apply if that worker wants to be part of a monopoly union. Dean Zarras wrote a terrific editorial in Forbes this week that makes this point brilliantly: Is a union member still a member when “membership” is not optional? (The military refers to this as “conscription.”) Note that this is synonymous with some more judo on the ridiculous term, “working family”… Is a family still a working one when their household income crosses some imaginary class-warfare-fueling threshold? Two wage earners, each working their butts off for the benefit of their family, but producing a combined income of say, $250,000: no longer a working family? What about a unionized teacher, married to a unionized firefighter, having three kids and no nanny but a similar combined income? Unions (and the DOL and NLRB who are now doing their bidding) are all about the freedom to associate, so long as you “choose” to associate with unions. But should you decide that a union is not for you, watch out. They use their monopoly status – backed by the full force of the federal government – as a club. Here is the problem with this view of the freedom of association. For the freedom to associate to have any power whatsoever you also have to have the freedom to NOT associate with a group. Otherwise, as Zarras rightly notes, it is not association. It is conscription. That is exactly how unions want the world to work – you are free to associate with whoever you want, so long as whoever you want is a union. It is easy to dismiss this type of talk in an era where unions are becoming increasingly irrelevant. But it should not be easily dismissed. There is nothing more fundamental in a free country than the right to free speech (even speech you don’t agree with) and the right to associate freely with whomever you choose. That the federal government is being asked to so clearly trample on these two freedoms in the workplace is extremely troubling.
