North Carolina Collective Bargaining Ban Threatened

Forced unionism apologists in the North Carolina House, seeking to remove the Tar Heel State’s 50-year-old ban on collective bargaining by state and local government employees, moved one step closer to getting the camel’s head in the tent.

Big Labor Rep. Dan Blue’s pro-monopoly bargaining bill seemingly died in May, when it missed a legislative deadline without securing a vote. However, early this month Blue resuscitated the scheme by tacking on a $100,000 appropriation and thus transforming it into a “spending” bill.

According to Gary Robertson of the Associated Press, the bill that cleared the House Judiciary Committee last Tuesday:

. . . doesn’t require all governments to enter into contracts or meet with their workers to discuss how workers will be paid or treated. But it would order the Office of State Personnel to set up a process by next spring to certify employee organizations to participate in state negotiations.

North Carolina and Virginia are the only states that expressly ban state and local governments from entering into collective bargaining deals with their employees. A United Nations agency earlier this year urged North Carolina to remove its 1959 ban.

All North Carolina Right to Work supporters should contact their state representatives and remind them that handing union bosses monopoly power to bargain the contracts of government employees, whose salaries are paid by taxpayers, undermines our democratic institutions. Urge them to do everything possible to prevent union monopoly bargaining and taxpayer-subsidized union payroll deductions from becoming law in North Carolina.