Right-to-Work ... Those Who Oppose It Are Against Individual Free Choice ... Right-to-Work and Free-to-Choose Are the Same Thing

Sometimes words are good proxies for what meaning they are intended to convey and sometimes they aren't.

For example, is the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, really affordable? Of course not, at least not without costly and open ended taxpayer backstopping.

And is attendance at community colleges ever really going to be free, even if attending students aren't required to pay tuition? Of course not --- it's the taxpayer backstop again.


In that vein, let's examine the meaning of right-to-work legislation. What does it really mean? Well, it means simply that each individual employee has the freedom to choose whether or not to join a union and pay dues to the union.

To repeat, right-to-work simply means that an individual employee retains the right to choose whether to  join a union and pay union dues. It's merely supportive of an individual employee's freedom of choice with respect to what organizations to join or not join, as well as what to do with the money he earns while working for his employer. It's not the union who pays the employee or works hard to earn the paycheck. The employer and employee do that.

Of course, unions don't like for employees to have the freedom to choose. That's because employees will likely choose not to be coerced into helping the union leaders collect enough money to pay their employees --- other union officials. And another thing that unions do with the dues they collect coercively is use a healthy portion of that money to help elect staunch political allies of the unions, aka Democrats. And finally, they also take another considerable piece of the monies received to try to organize other employees working at other companies into additional bargaining units so the unions can collect more dues from more employees. It's an 'existential' business thing for them -- the more dues payers, the happier and wealthier the union leaders will be, in other words.

No, the freedom to choose as individuals what to do with the money they earn is not what unions want employees of companies to have. Not at all.

Wisconsin Lawmakers Pass Right-to-Work Bill says this:

"Wisconsin lawmakers voted Friday to make their state the 25th to enact right-to-work legislation ... sending it on to Gov. Scott Walker for his promised signature.

The Republican governor . . . plans to sign it Monday. . . .

The Assembly passed the bill 62-35 after a marathon session that included about 20 hours of debate. It was a straight party-line vote, with no Democrats backing the measure.

“Today is the day we have solidified the regressive era in Wisconsin,” Democratic Rep. Terese Berceau, of Madison, said minutes before the vote. . . .

(Republican Speaker) Mr. Vos accused Democrats of having “Walker derangement syndrome,” and said the bill was about giving workers the freedom to choose whether to pay union dues.

“I’m not going to apologize about using the word freedom,” said Republican Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt, of Fond du Lac. “I’m going to use it over and over again because that’s what this is about.”

Rep. LaTonya Johnson, a Democrat from Milwaukee, and a member of AFSCME, said she cares about people more than freedom. “It just angers me to know that we come here and we pass bills that affect people’s everyday lives, and we don’t have a clue as to how those everyday people live or how they survive,” she said.

The proposal would make it a crime punishable by up to nine months in jail to require private-sector workers who aren’t in a union to pay dues. . . .

Twenty-four other states have right-to-work laws. Michigan and Indiana were the two most recent states to enact it, both in 2012."

Summing Up

Allowing individuals to chose what organizations to support with their hard earned money sounds very much like the American way to me.


Thus, count me very strongly in the free-to-choose camp for the rights of individual employees regardless of whether they are part of a 'union shop' or not.

Of course, the Dems and the union advocates like LaTonya Johnson don't like it one little bit. But they really have nothing worthwhile to sell, and so coerce they must --- but under the fiction of fairness and helping the employees, of course.

Coercion and anti-freedom of choice are the anti-right-to-work positions of the Dems and the union leaders.


That's my take.

Thanks. Bob.