Data Point - when given a choice, Union Members become Right To Work Citizens - Granite Grok

Data Point – when given a choice, Union Members become Right To Work Citizens

Listen up, Mark MacKenzie and James Andrews (head AFL-CIO in NH and NC) – Right To Work is all about choice.  From the Milwaukee Journal -Sentinel via Hot Air, it shows that when Union Members can still work without having to be part of anti-choice unions, they voted with their feet and no longer paying their dues:

Wisconsin’s public employees are leaving their unions in droves, which should be no surprise: With passage of Act 10 in 2011, public unions in the Badger State lost many of their reasons for being. The “budget-repair bill” pushed through the Legislature by Republicans and signed into law by Gov. Scott Walker limited bargaining to wages only, and then only up to the cost of living; it also required unions to recertify each year and barred the automatic collection of union dues. Relying on federal financial records, the Journal Sentinel’s Dan Bice found union membership has declined by 50% or more at some unions, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees District Council 48, which represents Milwaukee city and county workers.

It has gone from more than 9,000 members and income exceeding $7 million in 2010 to about 3,500 members and a deep deficit by the end of last year. Walker inherited a budget mess from the administration of former Gov. Jim Doyle. He was facing a sizable deficit and entrenched public sector unions that had big political power bases that they used to protect their members. That often put them at odds with both good government and overburdened taxpayers. It was necessary to ask more of public workers — to have them pay a larger portion of their benefits. In particular, Walker needed to get control of spiraling health care benefits.

In fact, every union in Wisconsin is bleeding members.  Choice is so neat – it allows people to better act in their own self-interest instead of being bullied into something.  Unions depend on the force of Government to take dues monies away from their members – Wisconsin shows that if voluntarily paying union dues is the norm, people are deciding to no longer belong because the unions obviously are providing good value for the money taken from them.

So when MacKenzi and Andrews wrote this (emphasis mine):

The decision by gun manufacturer Sturm, Ruger to build new facilities in North Carolina and not New Hampshire has resurrected the old debate over whether right-to-work laws harm a state’s economy and quality of life.

As the top labor leaders of two states with very different experiences with right-to-work, we maintain that right-to-work is not a viable strategy for economic growth. In North Carolina, which has had a right-to-work for less law since 1947, it has encouraged the development of a low-wage economy and institutionalized poverty and an environment that puts corporate profits ahead of the well-being of North Carolina families.

The reality is that Sturm, Ruger’s decision has less to do with right-to-work and more with a demonstrated practice of increasing its profits at any cost — including the elimination of a strong middle class. And it is moving to a state whose legislature has embraced the same extreme ideology, at a terrible cost to the people who live there.

They KNEW what has happened in Wisconsin – so who are you going to believe: their Op-Ed or your lying eyes?  A couple of points:

  • If RTW is not a viable strategy for economic growth, then why did all of your union members become former union members of their own free will.  Certainly they have counted the cost and decided that they would be economically better without you than with you?
  • Unions do not define the middle class – especially when you and your members only make up 6% of all workers.  You just don’t have the size to claim that mantle (if you ever did, and if you did, to claim it now shows that your economics are stuck in “the long gone”.  If you “are” the middle class, that middle class is in trouble indeed!
  • Let me point out the startling obvious – the former Wisconsin union members didn’t have to move to take advantage of what a pro-free capitalism Legislature has given them – by taking away a Government created distortion of the labor market in favor of unions, these workers voluntarily decided that they would be unbound of their union shackles and take advantage of a more free (and, I bet, a more responsive marketplace).

Mr. MacKenzie and Andrews – I am really betting that you hate Worker Freedom right about now, eh?  You can’t blame this on just a ‘few’ – we’re talking tens of thousands leaving your organizations.

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