Investor’s Business Daily: Forced Dues-Collecting Union Bosses Freeload Off Employees

Any day now, Big Labor Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon is expected to veto Right to Work legislation that reached his desk earlier this month.  And it seems that, although support for abolishing forced union dues and fees is very strong in both chambers of the Show-Me State Legislature, Right to Work allies will probably not be able to muster sufficient votes to override a gubernatorial veto.

Despite the obstruction of politicians like Nixon, the Right to Work issue is “red-hot,” as an Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) editorial last week put it.  (To read the entire editorial, see the link below.)

The vast majority of Americans have long agreed that no employee should be fired for refusal to pay dues or fees to an unwanted union, and the intensity of pro-Right to Work sentiment is growing, in part because of improved public understanding of how forced union financial support compounds the injustice of labor laws granting union officials monopoly-bargaining power over employees:

[M]any workers don’t want to live under the one-size-fits-all structure of union contracts that, among other things, often force employers to give promotions and raises on the basis of seniority, not individual performance and hard work.

So the collective bargaining agreement may be a detriment to high performers who could do better on their own. In these cases, . . . the union . . . is freeloading off of workers who must pay compulsory dues for union rules they personally oppose and don’t benefit from.

The need for expanded economic opportunities is a second important reason that public pressure is mounting on elected officials in the 25 remaining non-Right to Work states to join the other 25 in barring compulsory unionism:

It’s getting harder all the time for unions to prop up the fiction that states can have high job growth and forced union rules at the same time.

Anyone who doesn’t think right-to-work laws matter should drive by Charleston, S.C.’s international airport where a massive new Boeing airplane factory is being built, bringing some 7,000 new jobs to the region. Non-right-to-work Seattle, the other home for Boeing, lost the competition to keep that facility.

No wonder, as the IBD editorial concludes, “America is on the way to being a right-to-work nation.”

As an Investor’s Business Daily editorial this week noted, employees whose seniority is relatively low and/or whose productivity is relatively high are routinely hurt by “one-size-fits-all” union contracts negotiated by Big Labor bosses who wield monopoly-bargaining privileges. Cartoon: Jim Lange/Daily Oklahoman

Missouri Shows Growing Strength Of Right-To-Work Movement