Comments Elsewhere

Andrew Rogers: Then, because they’ve been “forced” to bear the weight of all these “free riders,” they demand the power to extract forced dues from employees who didn’t choose to join the union in the first place.

Unions do not extract forced dues from anybody. You don’t have a natural right to work in open shops. Sorry.

The legal and regulatory structure that legally forces business-owners to negotiate with NLRB-recognized unions is a form of coercion. The legal enforcement of the terms of union shop or closed shop contracts is not. (You might say that there’d be a lot fewer union shops if it weren’t for government intervention. Maybe that’s true and maybe it’s not. But if it is, so what? There’d be a lot fewer HMOs if it weren’t for government intervention, too, but that doesn’t mean that you are forced to patronize an HMO, or that the fees you pay them are “extracted” from you.) The distinction is a matter of some practical importance, since systematic attempts to blank it out are the usual justification for the so-called “right to work” (i.e., anti-union shop) laws that are on the books in many states. Those laws have absolutely no justification from a libertarian standpoint, but anti-union conservatives almost universally trot out phoney libertarian rhetoric about “forcing workers to join unions” in order to justify them.

Michael Giesbrecht: I don’t know of any reason to be pro union even in a free market scenerio where unions have no legal means of using violence to acheive their goals. What service would they provide to their members to justify their dues?

This is frankly silly. You may as well ask what services business or professional associations would provide to their members to justify their (much higher) dues, in a free market scenario where they have no legal means of using violence to achieve their goals. The answer is, all kinds of things; and what things are in question depends in part on the organization you’re thinking of.

Different kinds of unions have historically provided different kinds of services. Coordinating strikes or slow-downs with demands (for better wages and conditions, for more autonomy, or whatever), providing a forum for workers to talk with each other, providing a forum for airing grievances against management, providing representation for the worker’s interests in grievances against management, keeping and publishing information about which employers treat workers well and which treat them poorly (for example, this is one of the primary functions of unions that are uncomfortable with admitting that they’re unions, such as the AAUP), offering venues in which workers can get to know each other and socialize, providing a cooperative organization for services like education or health insurance or funeral benefits or any number of other kinds of mutual aid, providing hiring halls where new workers can find a job, or even serving as a cooperative structure for coordinating direct ownership and management of shops by the workers themselves, have all been stated goals and actual practices of historical labor unions. (Labor unions have often disagreed vigorously with one another over the best ways to achieve this — for example whether to organize by shop, by craft, by industry, or by region; whether to form unions that are racially, nationally, or gender segregated; the level of solidarity to practice with other unions; what kind of goals to set; what kind of dues to charge; how to pick people for positions of executive authority, for how long, under what conditions, and with what powers; whether to actively bargain with employers or just to set demands; who should do the bargaining if bargaining is done; etc. etc. etc. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but whether or not to try to exercise political control through the State in order to achieve demands. Before the Wagner Act gave a massive government subsidy to one particular variety of unionism — conservative AFL-line unionism, focused on collective bargaining for wage and benefit improvements — there were many significant unions, such as the Wobblies, that spurned electioneering and lobbying in principle, and stated explicitly anarchist goals.)