| | Michael,
Saying you would want all of your employees to be members of a union, is your right... your right to make what I see as a foolish statement, and your right, in a free country, to INSIST that employees must be members of the union to work there. This is because in a free country you, as the owner, and the employees, would have the right to make that kind of contract.
But that isn't the arrangement in states without right to work laws. In those states, the government permits a third party, the union, to force the employees to join, and forces the business owner to tolerate this. The employer is denied any right to say who he employs, and the workers are denied any right to contract with the employer on their own, or through an agent of their choice.
In California, when I worked for Los Angeles County's Department of Family and Children's Services I was forced to join SEIU and to pay their dues. I made no agreement with this organization, but I had to pay the dues, and put up with whatever they negotiated.
The prosperity in the right to work states is due to the increase in freedom - that's not fascism.
Maybe you didn't read Ed's article. He wrote, "By empowering labor unions the government did away with the old common law rules of contract, property, and tort that applied equally to all involved parties. They were replaced with a coercive legal framework designed to help labor union leaders attain their goals."
All of these laws that give special legal status to unions should be done away with. Then an employee could choose from any one of many different unions to represent them and the employer would be free to work with that union or not. The result would be an efficient market place that gave the best rate for a given job. Giving monoply power to unions just generates unnecessary unemployment, ugly class warfare tactics so beloved by socialists, and continues the myths unions continue to push.
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