Civil rights do not afford you the power to take other people’s property or limit other people’s freedom. Yet union bosses are pushing a new scheme that would trample people’s rights by adding “union organizing” as a new right to be included under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO boss said, “It should be a right. Everyone should have a right to come together to better their economic lot. … It is a right. The right to have a voice on the job should be every much as strong and as institutionalized as the right to vote and everything else — not to be discriminated against.”
Of course, everyone has the right to be in a union today. What Trumka does not want is to include the inverse proposition — you have a right not to join a union as well. That would, in his mind, be a civil rights violation.