National Right to Work Committee®
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We at the National Right to Work Committee are fighting at many levels to protect America's working men and women's right to decide for themselves whether or not a union deserves their financial support.
Whether it be in the state and federal legislatures, the courts, or hearing rooms at the FEC or the NLRB, we fight to ensure that workers join unions because they want to – not out of fear or federal mandate.
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SQ 695: The Issue Is Freedom
by Reed Larson
FOR RELEASE: August 28, 2001
Imagine being told by a long-distance provider that even though you didn't want their service, they were going to charge you for it anyway. Or being told by a local lawn service company that even though you wanted to tend your own yard, they were still going to charge you.
Sounds like tyranny, you say, and would never happen in America?
Think again.
Today in Oklahoma more than 100,000 workers are denied the freedom to bargain individually with their employer over their pay and working conditions. Instead, they must accept monopoly representation by union officials -- whether they want it or not.
Compounding this injustice, under current law these workers are also forced to pay union dues, or "fees" for representation they don't need, didn't want and never asked for. If they refuse, they are fired!
Simply put, independent workers have been denied their Right to Work.
But this can change September 25 if Sooner State voters support State Question 695, Oklahoma's Right to Work Law.
The Right to Work philosophy can best be summed up in the words of Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, who urged, "devotion to the fundaments of human liberty -- the principles of voluntarism." As Mr. Gompers explained, "No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion."
In Gompers' vision, there is simply no place in our constitutional system for powerful groups to force men and women to pay what amounts to blackmail just to get or keep their jobs.
Unfortunately, as the union movement has evolved from the Gompers era of dedicated leadership to the present-day era of a giant union "establishment," run by highly privileged professional union officials, the attitude toward forced membership has hardened into one of total opposition to all forms of voluntarism.
Sacrificing the welfare of workers for their own self-interest, union czars will stop at nothing to preserve their forced-dues empire upon which their livelihoods depends. Right to Work or voluntary unionism, in the lexicon of today's union boss, is a dirty word.
Oklahomans will never hear an explanation based on principle of why union officials should be privileged under federal law in a way officers of no other private organization are.
Nor will voters hear a justification why union bosses, in the words of President Clinton's first Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, should have "some ability to strap their members to the mast."
But Oklahoma's workers are not helped, but seriously harmed, when forced to finance Big Labor with the threat of losing their jobs.
Even Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute, an AFL-CIO-funded "think tank" in Washington, D.C., admitted in 1993 that one typical result of union boss-negotiated contracts is "reducing the pay of the most productive workers."
Any unbiased review of economic data shows that protecting employees' Right to Work promotes overall economic prosperity.
Studies by economists of all stripes show that living costs are lower and, consequently, real incomes are higher in the 21 Right to Work states than in the states that don't currently protect employees from federally-imposed forced union dues.
Big Labor, on the other hand, will attempt to bombard Oklahoma voters with misleading statistics that ignore such data in an either cynical or naïve attempt to suggest that taking away workers' freedom promotes prosperity.
Sadly, Oklahomans have realized what Samuel Gompers knew too well: Coercion is not the path to prosperity.
If the grotesque portrait of life in Right to Work states painted by AFL-CIO propaganda were even remotely accurate, would a net of five million Americans have moved from non-Right to Work states to Right to Work states during the 1990s, as Census Bureau data indicates?
There is no natural right in a free society for any private association to compel financial tribute. This choice should be left to the free individual.
Americans cherish their most basic freedoms: freedom of association, freedom in the marketplace and the freedom to work.
On September 25, Oklahomans will have a chance to regain that freedom by voting "yes" on S.Q. 695 and supporting Oklahoma's Right to Work Law.
Reed Larson is president of the Springfield, Va.-based National Right to Work Committee®.