We will continue to fight for right to work for Missourians’ good
The effort to protect worker freedom may have been dealt a setback with Proposition A’s recent defeat at the Missouri polls, but that doesn’t mean our fight is over. In fact, we’re just getting started combating the misinformation spread by union leaders terrified at being held accountable by the very people they claim to represent.
Being pro-union and supporting right to work are not mutually exclusive. We believe unions can play an important role when they put members’ interests first, which is why right to work is so important.
Giving workers the freedom to choose gives them a powerful accountability tool. It means unions have to show being a member is worth the dues. Under right to work, if workers feel a union’s leadership isn’t adequately representing them, they’re free to stop funding it.
Opponents of worker freedom like to claim that employees who don’t want to be union members are freeloaders who want the benefits of a union without having to pay for it. This isn’t true.
The Supreme Court ruled decades ago that unions are free to negotiate members-only contracts. Unions choose to represent all workers because it increases their revenues, which makes workers who would prefer to represent themselves forced riders, not free riders. Perhaps unions are scared of giving workers the freedom to walk away because union leadership has become increasingly out of touch with the rank-and-file members they are supposed to be representing, treating them more like cash cows than constituents.
Missourians only need to look at unions’ spending on political campaigns during the last election cycle to see the disconnect: 88 percent of their spending supported Democratic candidates, even though 43 percent of union households supported Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. They’ve also spent over a billion dollars in workers’ “collective bargaining” dues to advance left-wing causes over the past eight years.
More to the point, let’s look at what’s happened in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent Janus v. AFSME decision, which said public employees could no longer be forced to pay “agency fees” to unions — the same freedom right-to-work laws would give private-sector employees.
In response to the court’s ruling, the American Federation of Teachers has embarked on a push to persuade school workers to stay in the union, focusing on building better relations between the union and membership. Evan Stone, a founder of Educators for Excellence, a teacher-led advocacy organization, told The New York Times, “This whole effort to reconnect is only happening because of Janus, and it should have been happening the whole time.”
That’s a good development — for unions and their members. Right to work does the same for private-sector unions.
Anti-worker-freedom advocates like to claim that right to work is an underhanded plan to kill unions. But union membership rose in states with right to work and fell in states without it from 2005 to 2015, according to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank.
And when the actual cost of living is considered, private-sector employees in right-to-work states earn as much as those in states with forced unionization.
Since 2015, Americans for Prosperity-Missouri has been traveling the state, hearing from people who share our view that right to work is good for union members because it forces unions to keep their members happy by providing them more value. The fact is, between 1973 and 2015 most people represented by a union never voted to be in that union, but rather inherited one that was voted in years ago.
These workers feel they have no voice. They want their unions to start putting them first again, and they want the freedom to walk away if they feel that’s not the case.
It’s our mission to make sure the voices of these men and women are heard around our state. We’re not going to stop speaking out about the injustice of forced unionization until workers are free to choose and workplace freedom is protected.
Jeremy Cady is the state director for Americans for Prosperity-Missouri, a libertarian 501(c)(4) nonprofit.
This story was originally published August 23, 2018 at 8:35 PM.