Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation as well as of the National Right to Work Committee, a 2.2 million member public policy organization. He holds aB.A. in finance from James Madison University and an associate’s degree in marketing from the State University of New York. His writings have appeared in such newspapers and magazines as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, the Orange County Register, the National Review and others. The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on January 31, 2011 during a conference co-sponsored by the Center for Constructive Alternatives and the Ludwig von Mises Lecture Series. Due to its length, we will reprint this speech in two parts with the following proviso: “This reprint is with the permission from Imprimis, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.”
The following is the first part of Mark Mix’s speech:
BOEING IS A GREAT AMERICAN COMPANY. Recently it has built a second production line—its other is in Washington State—in South Carolina for its 787 Dreamliner airplane, creating 1,000 jobs there so far. Who knows what factors led to its decision to do this? As with all such business decisions, there were many. But the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—a five-member agency created in 1935 by the Wagner Act (about which I will speak momentarily)—has taken exception to this decision, ultimately based on the fact that South Carolina is a right-to-work state. That is, South Carolina, like 21 other states today, protects a worker’s right not only to join a union, but also to make the choice not to join or financially support a union. Washington State does not. The general counsel of the NLRB, on behalf of the International Association of Machinists union, has issued a complaint against Boeing, which, if successful, would require it to move its South Carolina operation back to Washington State. This would represent an unprecedented act of intervention by the federal government that appears, on its face, un-American. But it is an act long in the making, and boils down to a fundamental misunderstanding of freedom.
Where does this story begin?
The Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley
In 1935, Congress passed and President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), commonly referred to as the Wagner Act after its Senate sponsor, New York Democrat Robert Wagner. Section 7 of the Wagner Act states:
Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.
Union officials such as William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and John L. Lewis, principal founder of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), hailed this legislation at the time as the “Magna Carta of Labor.” But in fact it was far from a charter of liberty for working Americans.
Section 8(3) of the Wagner Act allowed for “agreements” between employers and officers of a union requiring union membership “as a condition of employment” if the union was certified or recognized as the employees’ “exclusive” bargaining agent on matters of pay, benefits, and work rules. On its face, this violates the clear principle that the freedom to associate necessarily includes the freedom not to associate. In other words, the Wagner Act didn’t protect the freedom of workers because it didn’t allow for them to decide against union membership. To be sure, the Wagner Act left states the prerogative to protect employees from compulsory union membership. But federal law was decidedly one-sided: Firing or refusing to hire a worker because he or she had joined a union was a federal crime, whereas firing or refusing to hire a worker for not joining a union with “exclusive” bargaining privileges was federally protected. The National Labor Relations Board was created by the Wagner Act to enforce these policies.
During World War II, FDR’s War Labor Board aggressively promoted compulsory union membership. By the end of the war, the vast majority of unionized workers in America were covered by contracts requiring them to belong to a union in order to keep their jobs. But Americans were coming to see compulsory union membership—euphemistically referred to as “union security”—as a violation of the freedom of association. Furthermore, the nonchalance with which union bosses like John L. Lewis paralyzed the economy by calling employees out on strike in 1946 hardened public support for the right to work as opposed to compulsory unionism. As Gilbert J. Gall, a staunch proponent of the latter, acknowledged in a monograph chronicling legislative battles over this issue from the 1940s on, “the huge post-war strike wave and other problems of reconversion gave an added impetus to right-to-work proposals.”
When dozens of senators and congressmen who backed compulsory unionism were ousted in the 1946 election, the new Republican leaders of Congress had a clear opportunity to curb the legal power of union bosses to force workers to join unions. Instead, they opted for a compromise that they thought would have enough congressional support to override a presidential veto by President Truman. Thus Section 7 of the revised National Labor Relations Act of 1947—commonly referred to as the Taft-Hartley Act—only appears at first to represent an improvement over Section 7 of the Wagner Act. It begins:
Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any and all such activities. . . .
Had this sentence ended there, forced union membership would have been prohibited, and at the same time voluntary union membership would have remained protected. Unfortunately, the sentence continued:
…except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 158(a)(3) of this title.
This qualification, placing federal policy firmly on the side of compulsory union membership, left workers little better off than they were under the Wagner Act. Elsewhere, Taft-Hartley did, for the most part, prohibit “closed shop” arrangements that forced workers to join a union before being hired. But they could still be forced to join, on threat of being fired, within a few weeks after starting on the job.
Continued in two weeks…