As a follow up on this post. I certainly recognize many benefits of unions and strongly believe much needs to be done to protect unions and union members from employer discrimination and coercion that results in the firing of union supporters or prevention of union organizing to begin with.
In this light, the Employee Free Choice Act probably offers a lot of good. However, it is hypocritical to speak of free choice while insisting that union shops be able to discriminate based on union support (by opposing Right To Work). One attack on the Act is that it would make votes on unionization public, leading to coercion from unions (to match the current coercion from employers). This seems a rational attack. My privacy should protect my decision to support or not support a union, it is between me and the union, not me and my coworkers or employer unless I choose.
I should point out that the AFL-CIO makes this argument:
Union membership brings better wages and benefits and a real voice on the job. It’s no accident that the 25-year decline in workers’ wages in our country has paralleled a 25-year slide in the size of the America’s unions.
Union membership does bring better wages (according to my prior regression analysis) but much of the decline in wages relative to a decline in unions is not related. The decline in wages is largely due to the massive increase in health care costs. Both the rate of increase in costs and the fact that an increase in cost reduces wages are in large part the fault of our health care structure that unions are responsible for. In this way, unions are responsible for stagnating wages. So while unions do need better protection in many ways, we need to approach union issues with a degree of sanity and not allow them to dominate society the way corporations have in recent years.
