National Right to Work Bill Reintroduced in Congress

FOR RELEASE: May 15, 2001

Joined by 29 original cosponsors, Virginia Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R) reintroduced the National Right to Work Act (H.R. 1109) in the U.S. House of Representatives March 20. A companion Right to Work Bill sponsored by North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms (R), with three cosponsors, was introduced in the Senate May 14th.

Like other Right to Work measures introduced since 1995, H.R. 1109/S. 873 would repeal five provisions in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and one in the Railway Labor Act (RLA) that authorize the firing of workers for refusal to pay dues or "fees" to union officials whom federal bureaucrats have certified as their "exclusive" (monopoly) bargaining agents.

H.R. 1109/S. 873 would simply return to workers the freedom to decide as individuals whether or not a labor union, like any other private group, deserves their financial support.

Right to Work Supporters' Hopes For Floor Votes Are Far Higher in the New Congress

Mr. Goodlatte's and Mr. Helms' forced-dues repeal measures have returned in a congressional climate that is becoming much friendlier for Right to Work supporters.

President George W. Bush and the top leaders of both chambers of Congress are all on record in favor of forced-dues repeal.

With the White House's backing, congressional Right to Work supporters now have a window of opportunity to initiate a debate over whether federal labor policy should favor compulsory financial support for unions.

Forced Dues Compound Injustice Of Forced Union Representation

Compulsory union dues are actually only half of a double-pronged attack on employee freedom by federal labor law.

Under the NLRA and RLA, individual employees subject to forced-dues payment are also barred from bargaining with their employer on their own behalf as well as from being represented by any organization other than their federally-sanctioned "exclusive" bargaining agent.

The fact is, as even the unofficial monthly union publication Labor Notes, a dyed-in-the-wool proponent of forced unionism, shows in report after report,many union officials systematically abuse their monopoly bargaining power.

For example, one recent article charged United Autoworkers (UAW) union officials with pressuring managers at Ford auto plants to get workers who had refused to kowtow to their local UAW brass put on involuntary "psychiatric leave."

The author, an independent-minded UAW official, cited the experiences of three workers who were put on "leave." He reported that not one of these workers had threatened or harmed anyone, or even been examined by a mental-health professional, prior to being labeled as "crazy."

Under current law, employees who are subject to such abusive tactics by union officials cannot withhold dues in protest - that is, stop paying for forced union representation that is obviously contrary to their best interest - unless they are prepared to be fired from their jobs.

In addition to workers who are singled out for punishment by vengeful union officials, countless others are harmed simply because their talents don't serve Big Labor's agenda.

Pro-forced unionism intellectual Richard Rothstein, a fellow at the AFL-CIO-funded Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., has conceded that Big Labor-negotiated contracts usually have the effect of "reducing pay of the most productive workers."

Big Labor's Use of Forced Dues For Politics Dwarfs Acknowledged Federal Contributions

According to Department of Labor reports, union officials collect $5 billion in forced union dues from private-sector workers every year as a result of the forced-dues provisions in federal law.

Organized Labor devotes a huge portion of its forced-dues income to politics.

Prior to the 1996 and 1998 elections, the AFL-CIO levied special dues hikes on millions of workers to finance well-publicized $35 million and $15 million media and get-out-the-vote campaigns targeting mainly opponents of compulsory unionism in Congress.

These represented only the tip of the iceberg.

The bulk of union politicking is "under the table" - in the form of hidden "soft money" contributions such as phone banks, politically-oriented mail, and "loans" of paid union staff to select politicians.

Because unions are not required to report most "in-kind" contributions, it is not possible to calculate the exact scale of Big Labor's forced-dues politicking.

However, independent experts agree that union "in-kind" expenditures dwarfed Organized Labor's $83 million in reported contributions to federal candidates and party committees in 1999 and 2000.

Noted journalist Victor Riesel, a personal friend of long-time AFL-CIO chief George Meany, argued persuasively in a series of syndicated columns that unreported union campaign expenditures are worth up to 10 times as much as the reported cash contributions.

"[N]oncash contributions consist of staff time - meaning union officials who are assigned to campaigns for months on end - printing costs, postage, telephone and various other support services financed entirely with compulsory union dues and fees," explained Mr. Riesel.

The Riesel formula puts the total value of Big Labor's hidden 1999-2000 federal slush fund at roughly $800 million, overwhelmingly derived from forced dues and "fees"!

When confronted directly with Mr. Riesel's formula, union officials act deeply offended, but refuse to provide even an estimate of the value of their "in-kind" campaign spending. At the same time, union officials' own offhand statements and published reports suggest that, as applied today, the Riesel formula is quite conservative.

Consider the following:

The total value of paid staff time for private-sector unions alone exceeds $2.4 billion a year, or roughly $10 million per working day.

And a host of recent public statements by union officials themselves confirm that a large share of paid union staff time is devoted to partisan politics and lobbying.

In January, for example, several AFL-CIO officers told The New York Times, in effect, that thousands of union organizers ceased their organizing activities for several months in 2000 to focus solely on electing and reelecting their favored politicians.

As reporter Stephen Greenhouse summarized their admission, "[U]nions organized fewer members last year because they threw so much money, energy and manpower into electoral politics."

All by themselves, the forced dues-funded salaries and benefits of union staff while they are on political assignments would come to hundreds of millions of dollars each election year.

In February 2000, an AFL-CIO spokesman confirmed for Washington Post reporter Frank Swoboda that the $40 million that the national AFL-CIO umbrella organization had announced it planned to spend on "in-kind" support for last year's federal campaigns did "not include any money spent by the federation's 68 member unions."

The total revenue of the AFL-CIO itself is under 5% of the revenue of the AFL-CIO's international affiliated unions (not to mention the revenue of thousands and thousands of state and local union subsidiaries).

And the officers of most of the larger international affiliates, such as the Teamsters, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the Service Employees International Union, are at least as politically active as AFL-CIO officers themselves.

Therefore, Mr. Swoboda's report logically puts the total value of the AFL-CIO conglomerate's 1999-2000 federal slush fund in the high hundreds of millions of dollars.

Regulatory Approach Benefits Lawyers, Bureaucrats, Union Officials

The issue is not that union officials play politics - it is that they play politics with other people's money. Millions of Americans are forced, because they are compelled to pay union dues, to subsidize someone else's political agenda on pain of being fired for refusing.

This injustice can only be addressed by eliminating the forced-dues provisions in federal law, thus making dues payments voluntary and giving individual employees effective influence over how their money is spent.

Proposals to address the problem by giving union-represented workers merely the option to seek partial refunds of dues used for politics are doomed to failure. They ultimately reaffirm the system of compulsory unionism that is the root of the problem and force workers to enlist the help of lawyers and bureaucrats to retrieve money that should never have been taken from them in the first place.

Compulsory Unionism Damages Competitiveness, Destroys Good Jobs

Moreover, remedies that focus solely on the political abuse of forced union dues convey the false message that it is somehow less unjust to force workers to pay for hate-the-boss propaganda with which they disagree than for "in-kind" contributions to candidates they don't support.

Compulsory unionism itself violates the dignity of the individual worker, regardless of how the forced union tribute is spent.

As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich A. Von Hayek wrote, "[T]he coercion which unions have been permitted to exercise . . . is primarily the coercion of fellow workers."

Walter Williams, a respected economist and syndicated columnist, has been more blunt.

"The union struggle is not against employers," Mr. Williams wrote in a 1994 column. "It's against workers. One way you see this is to ask: Who gets beat up or killed during a strike? It's not the owners or management; it's workers who've disagreed with the union and wish to work."

The coercive powers union officials wield courtesy of federal labor law not only rob individual employees of fundamental freedoms, but exert a damaging and corrupting influence on work places, the economy, and other aspects of everyday American life.

Union officials routinely wield their monopoly bargaining power to secure contracts full of wasteful and inefficient work rules that lead to payroll padding and job featherbedding.

Such practices, even as they enhance the union bosses' power by bringing more dues-payers under their control, drive business costs sky-high, and push some employers into bankruptcy, destroying jobs with the firms that created them.

Right to Work Creates Jobs, Higher Real Income

State Right to Work laws (now 21 in number) greatly mitigate the harm caused by federally-sanctioned union monopoly.

These laws protect private-sector employees from being fired under the forced-dues provisions in federal labor law. They also bar forced union tribute in state and local government employment.

When employees' productivity and earning power are hamstrung by counterproductive union work rules, Right to Work laws empower them to fight back by withholding financial support for the union.

Therefore, it's not surprising that Right to Work states as a group consistently enjoy faster growth in jobs and personal income than non-Right to Work states.

Consider:

Right to Work states enjoyed a net 54% increase in non-farm jobs between 1969 and 1999, according to the U.S. Labor Department. The 29 forced-unionism states registered only a 37% gain during the same period. Meanwhile, real per capita personal income grew by 82% in Right to Work states, compared to 67% in forced-dues states.

2000 U.S. Census data released early this year demonstrate that America's economic base continued to shift to Right to Work states over the past decade. Voting with their feet, a net total of more than five million Americans moved from non-Right to Work states during the nineties.

A study published last year by Dr. James T. Bennett, a professor for George Mason University's Nobel Prize-winning Economics Department, demonstrated that real disposable income in metropolitan areas in Right to Work states is higher than in forced-unionism states' metro areas, where the cost of living, including state and local taxes, is on average 15% higher.

If cost-of-living differences are taken into account, and a handful of extraordinarily high-income metro areas are excluded, the mean two-income household in a Right to Work state has nearly $2000 more in after-tax purchasing power than its counterpart in a non-Right to Work state, concluded the study.

Projecting to the future from data provided in the Places Rated Almanac, by David Savageau and Ralph D'Agostino, Dr. Bennett estimated that, of the jobs to be created in Right to Work states between 2000 and 2005, 19.0% will be high-earning jobs, compared to just 11.6% in forced-unionism states.

Public Opinion Strongly Supports End to Forced Unionism

For decades, national opinion polls have shown that the American people believe it is wrong to force an employee to pay union dues in order to work and feed his or her family.

In a 1997 survey by Political/Media Research, Inc. (Mason-Dixon), 77 percent of Americans said employees should have the Right to Work regardless of union status.

Opinion surveys taken in 1995, 1993, 1984 and 1980 showed virtually identical results.

And every time Congress has voted on a forced-unionism issue, going back more than 35 years, the result has been a gain in support for Right to Work after the next election cycle.

For example, in 1996, the Senate voted for the first time on the National Right to Work Act.

Although the measure was defeated and Big Labor went on to spend an estimated half-a-billion dollars or more trying to buy the 1996 elections, the end result was a net gain of five Right to Work supporters in the Senate by early 1997.

Recorded votes on the Right to Work Bill in 2001 or 2002 would likely prove even more effective at mobilizing freedom-loving citizens to "convert" or oust forced-unionism proponents in Congress, because George W. Bush is publicly committed to signing such legislation.

The record shows that the American people want an end to federally-authorized compulsory union dues, and only Congress can do that. It's the congressional opponents of Right to Work who will have to explain their actions if they prevent the Right to Work Bill from reaching Mr. Bush's desk.