Laws like the one Indiana is poised to enact simply make union support voluntary. Hoosiers can’t be required to kick back part of their wages to the Republican Party or the Methodist Church or the Animal Liberation Front; the new measure will ensure that they don’t have to give a cut of everything they earn to labor unions, either.
Most Americans regard compulsory unionism as unconscionable. In a new Rasmussen survey, 74 percent of likely voters say non-union workers should not have to pay dues against their will. Once upon a time, labor movement giants like Samuel Gompers, a founder of the American Federation of Labor, agreed. “I want to urge devotion to the fundamentals of human liberty - the principles of voluntarism,’’ declared Gompers in his last speech to the AFL in 1924. “No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion.’’
But far from rejecting compulsion, Big Labor now fights tooth and nail to defend it. And no wonder: Unions have long since squandered the affection of the American public. In the years right after World War II, more than one-third of the US workforce was unionized; now the union membership rate is just 11.8 percent, and most of those members are government employees. In the productive economy, Americans continue to flee from organized labor. Last year only 6.9 percent of workers at private companies belonged to unions.
So as a matter of by-any-means-necessary expediency, it is easy to understand why Big Labor long ago embraced what liberal scholar Robert Reich (later Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor) dubbed “the necessity for coercion.’’ In order “to maintain themselves,’’ Reich said in 1985, “unions have got to have some ability to strap their members to the mast.’’ Or, as Don Corleone might have put it, to make them an offer they can’t refuse.
But is there any ethical reason - any honorable basis - for the union shop?
