Right to Work

"Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests." - United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23.4.

Scott Walker signs the Right To Work law in Wisconsin.

Nobody's saying you can't form a trade union. They're just saying you can't force people to join it. If you can deliver on your promises to improve pay and working conditions in a serious way, you can probably get people to sign on. Unions did this for years. Yes, it's harder to do it this way than with a rule that requires workers to join your union; yes, it's harder to do it this way than with rules forbidding the company from hiring scabs. But you can still do it, if you devote yourself to providing returns for the workers who pay dues. You can still make your case to the people, too, who may refuse to cross a picket line if they agree you are being shabbily treated.

It was too easy for a long time. Many unions did badly by their members, and devoted themselves to power and corruption instead of helping their own loyally as the first priority. If you want to survive, you'll have to get back to what made unions strong in the first place.

Wikipedia says that "scabs" in this context dates to the Elizabethan era, by the way. I had no idea.

5 comments:

douglas said...

"Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests." - United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23.4."

Well, I'd argue that the exception should be public sector workers. An opinion shared by:

A.F.L.-C.I.O. Executive Council, 1959: “In terms of accepted collective bargaining procedures, government workers have no right beyond the authority to petition Congress — a right available to every citizen.”

George Meany, President of AFL-CIO, 1955: "“It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government....The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service."
"...strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable."

Grim said...

That objection may be captured by the adjective "trade," possibly.

E Hines said...

Changing just a couple of words in FDR's quote above:

...strike of company employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of the company until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of the company by those who have agreed to support it is unthinkable and intolerable.

It's not far different from extortion. Nice company you got there. Be too bad if something happened to it.

Unions, per se, aren't bad. Neither are companies. Monopolies and monopoly power aren't bad. What's illegal (and bad) is abuse of the monopoly power. Section 6 of Clayton, which exempts unions from Sherman, explicitly authorizes unions' abuse of their labor monopoly, though. ...the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.... Of course it is, and it's the property of a man, not of government to dictate what a man will be permitted to do with it.

I'd be a lot less anti-strike if it were truly the collective action of the employees, if union behavior in Wisconsin during Walker's first term weren't typical union behavior, if it weren't for guys like Trumka repeatedly refusing to disavow violence as a legitimate tool of unions. Even the slur "scab" is demonstrative. All a scab is is a man willing to rent his labor at a lower rate than the union deems permissible.

Right to work laws, which don't actually grant a right, but acknowledge and enforce every man's property in his own labor, are steps in the right direction.

Eric Hines

Anonymous said...

Texas has had a right to work law for decades, and it also has unions. I worked at two chemical companies that had unions. People would place it this way:

"Yeah, XXXXX has a union, but then, they deserve it."

And, at the second company, I got acquainted with the union stewards, who were the most respected and productive employees on site. At both companies, nearly every one of the union workers was also engaged in some sort of free enterprise on the side.

There should of course be a right to form unions, and where there is a right to form unions, the right to work keeps them honest.

Valerie

douglas said...

Grim, you read like a philosopher-as if every word has meaning and is meant that way ;)

No longer, in common usage, does it mean that "Trade Unions" are only those which represent workers in the trades. Any union is now a 'trade union'.

Of course, the government also has employees who are in the trades as well.