The Future of Freedom Foundation’s "Freedom Daily" published an article titled "The Authoritarianism of American Labor Law" by George C. Leef, author of Free Choice for Workers: A History of the Right to Work Movement.

In it, Leef points out federal labor law, including the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), heavily favors union officials at the expense of workplace freedom and the individual rights of employees. Leef continues by pointing out the dangers to liberty the "Card Check" Forced Organizing schemes pose to workers’ rights:

The secret-ballot elections under the NLRA at least have the virtue of shielding individual workers from reprisals for going “the wrong way.” Union officials have found what they regard as a better method of determining whether a majority want their services. It’s called the “card check” system. If a majority of workers sign a card saying that they want a union to represent them, then that should suffice for the NLRB to declare the union to be the exclusive bargaining representative, without resort to an election. Naturally, it’s easier for union organizers to get signatures on cards — using tactics that can include misrepresentation and harassment — than to get workers to vote for them in an election after the airing of arguments for and against the union.

Under the NLRA, however, employers have the right to insist on a secret-ballot election no matter how many cards might be signed. The Employee Free Choice Act would take that away and require the NLRB to certify unions simply on the basis of signed cards.

Furthermore, the [so-called Employee Free Choice Act] EFCA would ratchet up the coercion regarding contract negotiations. The current law is bad enough in compelling “good faith” bargaining, but the proposed new law would allow government officials to arbitrate the terms of the initial union contract. That is to say, if management and the union can’t arrive at a mutually agreeable labor contract, the federal government will impose one. That additional dollop of federal coercion is said by supporters to be necessary to effectuate the workers’ “right to bargain.” In a free society, though, there is no “right to bargain” with people who don’t want to bargain with you, and a fortiori there is no right to have the government dictate the terms of that “bargaining.”

Union officials were licking their chops at the prospect of using the EFCA to dragoon thousands of new workers into their ranks, but the bill has died in Congress. It will be resurrected in the future and we will again hear supporters making claims of why we need its new coercive features. We will also hear opponents arguing that we should stick with the good old status quo. What I think we really need is a discussion about the proper approach to labor law in a free society.

To read the rest of the article and Leef’s proposal for ending the compulsion currently entrenched in American labor law, click here.

Perhaps due to their plethora of special privileges under the law, union bosses frequently act and speak as if they were the actual government. Take AFSCME Maryland union boss Patrick Moran, who insultingly blustered to the Baltimore Sun,

This is about democracy, bottom line. If you don’t like democracy, then I guess you don’t like the country we live in.

You see, Moran’s government union — with the support of union-label politicians like Governor Martin O’Malley — wants the power to force nonmembers to pay for "services" they didn’t ask for and don’t want.

"At some point we can’t be a charity," said Sue Esty, assistant director for AFSCME Maryland.

Union bosses want the special privilege effectively to tax independent employees as a condition of employment.

Of course, union chiefs refuse to accept the easiest, most fair solution. Rather than lobbying for a new law forcing nonmember employees to pay so-called "fees" to an unwanted union, union bosses could work to repeal any sections of the law which supposedly require them to "represent" nonmembers.

The reason union officials will never accept this solution is simple: they just want the money.

The fees could more than double the union’s annual income. Currently, the union collects about $3.8 million in dues from about 10,000 members a year.

With so much focus on the economic crisis, it’s worth revisiting a Wall Street Journal article penned recently by National Right to Work Committee and Foundation President Mark Mix. The article explains how a massive expansion in forced unionism power played a key role in making the Great Depression longer and deeper:

By the mid-1930s, the U.S. economy appeared to be climbing out of the Great Depression. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), which had bottomed out at 41 in 1932, was advancing. It increased 73% from the beginning of 1935 through the end of 1936, when it hit 180. The number of unemployed, 13 million in 1933, dropped to 9.5 million in 1935 and 7.6 million in 1936.

Then, in 1937, the DJIA plunged 33% in what is often called "a depression within a depression." Joblessness skyrocketed.

A principal factor in the meltdown that year was the U.S. Supreme Court’s surprise 5-4 decision in early April to uphold the constitutionality of the Wagner Act, which had passed two years earlier. This measure, which is still the basis of our labor relations regime, authorized union officials to seek and obtain the power to act as the "exclusive" (that is, the monopoly) bargaining agent over all the front-line employees, including union nonmembers as well as members, in a unionized workplace.

As Amity Shlaes observed in her recent history of the Great Depression, "The Forgotten Man," within a few months after the Wagner Act was upheld, industrial production began to plummet and "the jobs started to disappear, with unemployment moving back to 1931 levels," even as the number of workers under union control was "growing astoundingly."

Given the reality of unions in the workplace, the law meant that efficiency and profitability were compromised, by forcing employers to equally reward their most productive and least productive employees. Therefore subsequent wage increases for some workers led to widespread job losses.

Pre-Depression-era growth and prosperity did not return to the private sector until the early 1950s, when the spread of state right-to-work laws prohibiting forced union membership and dues greatly reduced the detrimental effects of the Wagner Act.

The U.S. has just experienced another stock market crash, and Barack Obama, the candidate now favored to be the next president, is in favor of what amounts to a new Wagner Act.

If the mislabeled "Employee Free Choice Act," becomes law, it will likely have a similar effect on the economy as the original Wagner Act, transforming what could have been a recovery into a lengthy, deep recession, or worse.

(Read the entire article)

Last year, Freedom@Work reported on the allegations of corruption against Tyrone Freeman, former boss of the largest Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate in California. Freeman spent nearly three-quarters of a million dollars of rank-and-file workers’ forced union dues on his wife’s and mother’s companies and on a luxurious fat-cat lifestyle. The Los Angeles Times later reported Freeman’s SEIU affiliate "charity" failed to spend a single cent on its charitable mission in two of the four years it has been in existence.

Today, the Los Angeles Times reports another SEIU union official corruption scandal, this time executive vice president of the SEIU’s Illinois-Indiana health care affiliate and national SEIU union board member Byron Hobbs.

Hobbs is accused of billing the union for $9,000 for personal expenses. The LA Times continues its report by putting the latest scandal in context:

…[former Freeman Chief-of-Staff] Rickman Jackson, was removed as head of the SEIU’s largest Michigan local, because he allegedly received improper lease payments for his Bell Gardens house.

Annelle Grajeda, president of both a second L.A. local and the SEIU’s state council, has been on leave since August, when the union began investigating whether she had improperly used her influence to keep her ex-boyfriend on the county payroll…

Last month, the union imposed a trusteeship on an Oakland-based local and fired its officers, accusing them of misusing dues money to wage a political battle against SEIU President Andy Stern.

And of course, who can forget that it was a SEIU union boss who was engaged in pay-to-play talks with former [and corrupt] Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich — to allegedly buy Obama’s then-vacant U.S. Senate seat.

Unfortunately, the people most hurt by union boss corruption are the rank-and-file workers, especially in forced unionism states. Right to work laws allow workers to hold union officials more accountable because workers can cut off union dues if they don’t like union officials’ so-called “representation,” politics, corruption, or fat-cat lifestyles.

As the vote on Solis’s nomination approaches, Foundation Legal Information Director Patrick Semmens sits down with Stan Greer of the National Right to Work Committee to discuss the scandals surrounding her appointment and the direction of an Obama-helmed Department of Labor.

In all the recent "stimulus" hoopla, President Barack Obama and Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman have found themselves in something of a war of words:

Sin City’s mayor wants President Barack Obama to apologize for saying companies shouldn’t visit Las Vegas on the taxpayer’s dime.

Oscar Goodman spoke after a regular scheduled meeting with tourism officials where he expressed concern that federal lawmakers might be discouraging travel to the city…

"You can’t get corporate jets, you can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer’s dime," Obama said.

President Obama has already begun paying back Big Labor’s big money boys for spending record sums to put him in the White House. As we reported yesterday on Freedom@Work, part of this payback is the Obama Administration’s quiet attempt to delay and ultimately cancel a new rule requiring union bosses to report more specific information about how they are spending their forced dues revenue.

Members and nonmembers forced to pay dues as a condition of employment deserve the right to know where their money is going — for instance, this private LearJet, shown below taking off in Las Vegas. Machinists union bosses spent $1.8 million (from forced dues) for hangars, jet fuel, jet maintenance, mechanics, pilots, and associated loan repayments in 2006 alone.

In November, Machinists union bosses flew the jet from Canada to Ireland on workers’ dime. But the Obama Administration is moving right now to keep the ordinary unionized worker from knowing how much this and other flights by union bosses cost the employees on a per-union-official basis.

Obama claims he wants transparency and accountability — but apparently he makes an exception for union bosses.

This week, National Right to Work Foundation president Mark Mix sent a formal letter to the director of the Department of Labor’s Office of Labor-Management Standards, the federal agency tasked with providing union members and nonmembers with valuable information about how union bosses are spending their forced dues.

The letter is in response to the Obama Administration’s apparent intention to delay (and ultimately cancel) some needed refinements to reporting requirements established by the Bush Administration which enhance union transparency and accountability of union expenditures.

Here are a few examples of union boss malfeasance the planned LM-2 revisions would elucidate:

• Why a local UAW union bought a John Deere tractor for $18,000 before selling it the same year for only $678
• Which Machinists union bosses are using forced dues during an economic downturn to fly to Ireland on a private jet
• How much union officials get paid in fringe benefits and whether those benefits comply with the union constitution

Mix’s letter further notes the appearance of impropriety created by the Obama Administration’s quick action to table the new disclosure requirements. Union bosses, who spent record sums electing Obama to the White House and who expect continued payback, have long opposed providing financial disclosure members and nonmembers.

Unfortunately, because of the incompetence of Bush Administration officials, these needed improvements to the LM-2 disclosure rules had not yet gone into effect — even though they had been in the works for two years. Outfoxed by the bureaucracy once again, the outgoing Bushies missed the window of opportunity by a matter of days.

For more, read the full text (PDF) of Mix’s letter.

Last Friday afternoon, as the Senate prepared to pass the massive, pork-filled “stimulus” bill, President Barack Obama quietly arranged to virtually ensure that every construction project funded by the federal government will result in more forced union dues revenue for Big Labor.

The new executive order signed by Obama on Friday encourages government bureaucrats to adopt discriminatory, union-only project labor agreements for any “large-scale construction project” – defined as any project costing over $25 million – and thus discriminate against the 92.5 percent of private sector workers who have chosen for a wide variety of reasons not to join a union.

With the “stimulus” bill approaching one trillion dollars including many such projects, Big Labor stands to rake in literally hundreds of millions of dollars in new forced-dues revenue seized straight out of workers’ paychecks, whether they support the union or not. (Meanwhile, other "stimulus" funds will go to groups with strong ties to organized labor.)

President Obama’s new executive order comes a week after he issued two other executive orders giving the Secretary of Labor unchecked, unprecedented authority to blacklist non-union employees wanting to work on federal contracts.

Taken together, the new executive orders indicate President Obama is quite eager to repay the union bosses for spending well over one billion dollars (in mostly forced union dues) to elect Obama and other pro-forced unionism candidates.

Moreover, Big Labor’s high command is likely to funnel that money right back into its political machine in expectation of even more forced unionism power grabs – including efforts toward the ultimate goal of eliminating all 22 state Right to Work laws by federal fiat.