The Employee Rights Act is an incredibly important piece of legislation you’ve never heard of – we should ask ourselves why.
The labor movement – born in Europe and imported here – has always been communist in its heart, deeply corrupt, distaining merit, progress and accountability, sowing divisiveness and demonizing all things management and capitalist. Before WW2 in America, they had the redeeming characteristic or working for safety and after WW2 they briefly supported apprenticeships, on-the-job training and worker competence in the trades but those things are long gone. All that is left are the un-American coercion, corruption and communitarianism. We should not forget that the labor movement won the safety and rights argument long ago; government guarantees these things now with far more authority than unions could ever have and without the lost wages and head busting that comes with striking.
The FDR, New Deal, 1935 National Labor Relations Act [aka Wagner Act] established vast powers for unions which were intended to empower workers with their employers and to help employers with the chaos of too many, often violent, unions operating simultaneously within individual work places. As with anything governmental, things went fine for a while until the inevitable unintended consequences had time to kick in.
The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act became an essential modification to the NLRB reigning in the activities and power of labor unions. Taft–Hartley consolidated more than 250 union-related bills pending in Congress in 1947 and was a response to the post-World War II labor upsurge. During the year after V-J Day, more than five million American workers were involved in strikes, which lasted on average four times longer than those during the war. The Taft–Hartley Act was seen as a means of demobilizing the labor movement by imposing limits on labor's ability to strike and by prohibiting radicals – especially communists – from their leadership.
The act was sponsored by Senator Robert Taft and Representative Fred A. Hartley and became law by overriding President Harry S. Truman's veto. Remember when the House and Senate worked together? Labor leaders called it the "slave-labor bill". Truman argued that it was a "dangerous intrusion on free speech,” and that it would "conflict with important principles of our democratic society" and then he used it twelve times to keep the unions from screwing up commerce and the economy. Does this remind you of Wisconsin’s Barrett ranting against Walker the “union buster” while happily using Walker’s reforms to save Milwaukee $millions by dropping the corrupt union insurance companies?
Well, it’s time to reign in unions again, particularly the public employee unions which never should have been allowed in the first place – even FDR was against government employee unions. There are two issues with unions which are difficult for me to prioritize; one is the fiscal, we may own as much as $3 trillion to government workers in the form of unfunded liabilities for unsustainable promises made by past governments; and the other is the essential founding principle of the exceptional American system of democracy – individual liberty.
The fiscal problem will kill us and people are starting to catch on – Democrats too. The liberty thing is harder for people to get excited about but a growing number of us are starting to choke on the size of government and even more so on the incessant intent of pinko/commie progressives and Bible-thumping evangelicals to use the federal government to intrude on every aspect of our daily lives – oh yeah and bankrupt us in the process.
Consider these threats to individual freedom:
· Total Union Members: 14.7 million, 11.9% of the workforce – private sector 7.0 million (6.9%) and public sector 7.6 million (36.2%).
· Annual dues paid to Unions: $8.2 billion. Total union assets: $8.8 billion. 92% of all unions fail to pass Department of Labor audits.
· Unions employ 173,526 officers and staff members who are paid $2.6 billion a year – officers get almost half of the total.
· The simple truth is that in almost all union shops, workers must join and must pay dues to the union as a condition of employment.
· Less than 10% of all unionized workers ever had a chance to vote for their union – the union shop was established one or two generations ago and nobody knows whether current workers would keep it or not.
· There is no mechanism for union workers to play any role in deciding how union leadership use their dues to affect public politics.
The Employee Rights Act was introduced to the 112th Congress on August 2, 2011 by Senator Orrin G. Hatch [R-UT] and 20 cosponsors. An identical bill was introduced to the House on August 5, 2011 by Congressman Tim Scott. The bill included seven core provisions:
1. Secret Ballot Elections. The Employee Rights Act requires that employees be given the right to have a federally supervised secret ballot election when deciding whether or not to join a union.
2. Union Recertification. The Employee Rights Act requires that every unionized workplace have a supervised secret ballot election every three years to determine whether employees want to continue to be represented by any incumbent union.
3. Paycheck Protection. The Employee Rights Act requires that labor unions obtain prior approval from employees to spend dues money on behalf of political parties, political candidates, or other political advocacy.
4. Standardized Election Timing. The NLRB recently introduced a regulation that would dramatically speed up the election process, the goal being to catch unwitting employers and employees unprepared. The Employee Rights Act requires that the NLRB wait 40 days between petition and election.
5. Decertification Coercion Prevention. The Employee Rights Act penalizes unions who coerce, discipline, or interfere with employees seeking to decertify a union.
6. Secret Ballot Strike Vote. The Employee Rights Act requires a majority of union members to approve a strike in a secret ballot election before union leaders can order a strike.
7. Criminalizes Union Threats and Violence. The Employee Rights Act forbids unions from threatening or engaging in violent or criminal behavior toward an employee.
Nobody can read these seven provisions and think that they are not completely appropriate for all Americans. I bet many people will be surprised to find that such things are not already everyday rights provided under the Bill of Rights – the problem folks, is that the government decided to take away our fundamental rights because the government knew what was good for us.
Union leadership will be quick to point out that returning these basic rights to us will mean the end of unions in America. They would likely be correct. As George Will says, union dues made optional become elusive.
You see, unions understand we are too dumb to see the advantage of unions and therefore must be ordered by government to institutionalize the will of the majority. In the good old days, unions could just break legs but in today’s enlightened world they need the force of law. Unions also need to institutionalize the will of previous generations because today, we’d almost certainly vote differently. Once the union is in, how dare we expect to have periodic referendums on their track record?
In case you think that I am too hard on union leadership and their minority of supporters, surveys of union households support these changes overwhelmingly – the support mostly runs in the high eighty percentiles. Poll results here: http://employeerightsact.com/poll.html.
On this subject and too many others, it is past time that we shove the feds out of our day to day lives. I think we need government as recommenders but we can manage educating our kids and taking care of the needy without their unConstitutional help.
