This Labor Day, Give American Workers the Right to Work | Opinion

Here’s a simple proposition most Americans can, and polls show do, support: Every worker should have the choice to join and pay dues to a union, and they should also be free to refrain from doing so if they choose.

This proposition seems like common sense, but unfortunately it isn’t reflected in how the law currently works in America. Instead, our labor laws are built on compulsion and force against the very workers they purport to protect.

If a workplace becomes unionized, all employees, including those who voted against, didn’t ask for, or never wanted a union, will be forced to abide by the contract union officials negotiate with their employer, and if they live in one of the 24 states that lacks a Right to Work law, they can be forced to pay dues to that union or lose their jobs.

To fix this, we should give workers more discretion over who represents them in the workplace and who gets their money. Right to Work laws seek to do this by making union dues voluntary.

Yet union bosses demand labor policies that diminish workers’ autonomy, so that they can more easily be corralled into union ranks.

Kamala Harris, endorsed in her bid for president by the top bosses of nearly every major labor union, supports an extreme version of this pro-union boss, anti-worker agenda.

First, Harris and her union-boss backers want to repeal existing worker protections. The vice president has made it clear that “banning Right to Work laws” is a top priority. But she wants to go even further. Her goal is to make it easier for union officials to take power over new groups of workers, even when many or even most oppose the union.

To accomplish this goal, Kamala Harris promises to expand mandated unionism to entire sectors though a scheme known as “sectoral bargaining.”

“It can no longer be that a specific group around a specific place has to organize,” Harris told a crowd of union officials in 2019 at an event hosted by the SEIU union. “We need to do it sector by sector.”

Harris is calling for an exponential expansion of the compulsion and force embedded in the workplace-specific union monopolies authorized under federal labor law dating back to the 1930s.

Under the present system, union officials can bind workers to a union contract at a single facility for a single employer. Some union monopolies are farther reaching, but in general, if a plant in Florida unionizes, employees of the same company in Georgia are unaffected.

Enterprise-level monopoly bargaining can force hundreds, even thousands of workers who oppose unionization into union ranks, and in non-Right to Work states these workers must give up a part of their paycheck to a union agenda they never supported. Still, the damage is limited to a single workplace or company.

A Harvard University report co-authored by a former SEIU attorney outlines the plan for establishing sector-wide union monopolies. The report describes itself as “the product of a nearly two-year effort to elicit the best ideas from a broad array of participants” including officials from most major unions.

“When a worker organization has a membership of 5000 workers in a sector or 10 percent of the workers in a sector (whichever number is lower), the Secretary of Labor will—upon request of the worker organization—establish a sectoral bargaining panel for the sector,” the plan states. “Sectoral bargaining agreements will become binding on all firms and all workers in the sector.”

In other words, under the Harris-backed “sector by sector” unionization scheme, if a small percentage of workers (10 percent or even less in large sectors) choose to join a union, all firms and all workers in their sector are forced under union boss control.

For the union officials who back Harris, this has the advantage of making it even easier to ignore the many workers who don’t want to affiliate with unions. Recent polling found 58 percent of workers were “not interested at all” in joining a union while barely one in 10 were “strongly interested.”

“Sectoral bargaining” is a dream come true for Big Labor union officials who want to control workers without their permission. It would give them power over entire economic sectors, which they could use to extract dues money for themselves while advancing their personal political agendas—which includes supporting politicians like Kamala Harris.

To celebrate workers this Labor Day, U.S. labor law should empower each worker to choose for themselves whether to affiliate with a union. In contrast, Kamala Harris’ proposal to force entire sectors of workers into union ranks would be a massive step in the wrong direction, and a nightmare for the workers it would trap in unions they oppose.

Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Committee.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.