With public attention being paid to state battles over union boss powers, Right to Work proposals have received plenty of attention from national publications. In The Washington Examiner, Right to Work President Mark Mix explains that states are turning to Right to Work laws to jump-start their troubled economies and safeguard workers' rights:

The logic of state Right-to-Work laws is ironclad: Not only is safeguarding worker freedom the right thing to do,it also yields tremendous economic benefits. Recent studies from the Cato Institute and the National Institute for Labor Relations Research suggest that Right-to-Work states enjoy higher job growth and more cost-of-living-adjusted disposable income for workers than their forced-unionism counterparts.

They also seem to be weathering the recession better than old Midwestern industrial bastions like Michigan, Illinois and Indiana, states that lack protections for individual workers' rights.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence in favor of state Right-to-Work laws was reported in a Wall Street Journal editorial last year. Citizens are voting with their feet, leaving forced-unionism states in droves for job opportunities with their Right-to-Work neighbors.

Elsewhere, Deroy Murdock lays out the case for a National Right to Work Act:

The NRTWA’s economic rationale is compelling:

● Among America’s 22 right-to-work states (including Florida, Georgia, and Texas), non-farm private-sector employment grew 3.7 percent from 1999 to 2009, while it shrank 2.8 percent among America’s 28 forced-unionism states (e.g. California, Illinois, and New York).

● During those ten years, real personal income rose 28.3 percent in right-to-work states and sank 14.7 percent in forced-unionism states.

● In 2009, cost-of-living-adjusted, per-capita, disposable personal income was $35,543 in right-to-work states versus $33,389 in forced-unionism states. Americans in right-to-work states enjoyed more freedom — and a $2,154 premium.

Notwithstanding that right-to-work states are comparatively prosperous engines of job growth, the case for right-to-work laws is not merely economic, but moral.

“Government has granted union officials the unprecedented power to force individual employees to pay up or be fired and to coerce workers into subsidizing union speech,” says the National Right to Work Committee’s Patrick Semmens. “This fundamental violation of individual liberty — an infringement on freedom of speech and freedom of association — finally would end with passage of the NRTWA.”

If you're looking for a straightforward introduction to the economic and moral case for Right to Work laws, both pieces are a good place to start. 

At National Review, John Berlau explains how the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act - better known to Freeom@Work readers as the Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill - threatens public safety:

But as with health care, liberals want to take away federalism in fire protection and force all American communities into a one-size-fits-all unionized model. The biggest congressional priority of the IAFF over the past few years has been the so-called Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, which would force unionization and collective bargaining on every one of the nation’s local fire departments.

And far from delivering fire protection that is quick and efficient, this legislation is almost guaranteed to bring big-city slowdowns to every town. According to the watchdog Public Service Research Council, public-employee strikes quadruple, on average, in the years after state laws mandating public-sector collective bargaining take effect.

So the question is, to paraphrase Krugman: Do you want to live in the kind of society in which this happens? Too bad if you answered “no,” because Krugman’s allies are determined to take the choice of non-unionized fire departments away from fire fighters and homeowners.

Read the whole thing here. As Berlau notes, the consequences of union-instigated fire department strikes have been devastating:

Similar damage and destruction occurred in the 1975 fire fighters’ strike in Kansas City, Mo. In The Municipal Doomsday Machine, his 1970s exposé of corruption in public-safety unions, journalist and National Review founding editor Ralph de Toledano vividly described a city paralyzed by union violence. According to his and other accounts, when fires hit — in suspiciously high numbers, as in Memphis — non-striking firefighters found fire extinguishers that had been filled with flammable liquid, oxygen tanks that had been emptied, and fuel tanks of fire trucks that had been fouled with water.

The 23-day Chicago fire fighters’ strike in 1980 was mostly free of the violence that plagued Memphis, Kansas City, and other places, but its duration made it much more deadly. On February 14, all but 400 of Chicago’s 4,300 fire fighters gave the Windy City a valentine by walking off the job. They formed picket lines in front of its 120 fire stations, shutting down more than half of them.

During the strike, “24 people died in incidents involving calls for help from the fire department,” the Chicago Tribune would recount 20 years later. One tragedy that could have been avoided was the death of brother and sister Tommie and Santana Jackson — ages 1 and 2, respectively — who perished in a fire in an apartment that, according to Time magazine, was “just half a block from a closed fire station.”

The risk of public safety strikes is just one more reason why the Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill is such a bad idea. For more information on the bill, click here. 

Here's a must-read editorial from National Review on Big Labor's Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill:

Lacking the evolutionary finesse that keeps most parasites from killing their host organisms, the American labor movement has driven the private firms that once employed its members offshore or into bankruptcy. Consequently, the only growth market remaining for the union movement is government: More union members today are employed by government than by the private sector. The union bosses, being neither blind nor stupid, see the advantages of sitting on both sides of the negotiating table, and their influence on politics has been predictably baleful. Unfortunately for those who would curtail their influence, they enjoy a steady stream of cash, expropriated from the paychecks of their members, and a ready supply of foot soldiers available for get-out-the-vote and rent-a-mob duties.

That’s a problem for conservatives. One of the more dynamic Republican leaders in the country, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, is battening down his political hatches for the hurricane of union abuse headed his way in response to his sober efforts to get his state’s finances in order. It is going to be ugly, with the unions employing the same tactics they used to derail the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger. So why in the name of Barry Goldwater would a single Republican, much less a half-dozen senators, support extending the influence of the people who made New Jersey New Jersey? The Senate Republicans supporting the bill include not only the usual practitioners of Me-Tooism — the Maine ladies, Lisa Murkowski — but also Scott Brown of Massachusetts and New Hampshire’s Judd Gregg. (What, no Lindsey Graham?) It would be cheaper and better for the country if these Republicans would just go ahead and make a direct donation to the Democratic National Committee, an act to which supporting this bill is equivalent. If Sen. Mike Johanns really wants to turn Lincoln, Neb., into Trenton on the Prairie, let him confine his efforts to his own state and leave the other 49 to go their own way.

Click here to read the whole thing. For more editorials opposing this terrible piece of legislation, check out our earlier blog post on the groundswell of public opposition to expanding Big Labor's control over public safety employees.

National Review's Jonah Goldberg has a good op-ed up on "card check" legislation at the Los Angeles Times:

There is a bloody spin war over whether card check abolishes the secret ballot or not. Pro-card-check forces insist that it doesn't. Unfortunately, these voices include many mainstream reporters who consistently use the language preferred by Big Labor. They note that if 30% of the workers sign a card asking for an election, they can have
one.

But this ignores the unions' crimp tactics. For starters, the cards are written in ways that make "predatory lending" mortgages seem like paragons of full disclosure.

At the National Right to Work website, you can find an example of one of these cards. In big, bold letters on top, it says "Request for Employees Representation Election." But after you fill out all the relevant info, then there's the small print, authorizing the Teamsters to "represent me in all negotiations of wages, hours and working conditions."

In other words, in many cases, workers who think they're just voting for an election are in fact voting for unionization. The unions make it as difficult as possible to do the former without also doing the latter. Check a card, find the king's shilling.

Also, if the number of cards is over 30% but below 50%, there still isn't an election unless the organizers -- not the workers -- want it.

As Mickey Kaus, a one-man blogging crusader against card check, wrote, "No individual worker will know if his signed card will provide the 31% plurality or the 51% majority. Only the organizers know this. You could sign the card intending to provoke an election and discover that you actually prevented an election. There's no way for ordinary workers to reliably game the system in order to 'choose' a secret ballot."

Translation: They're not workers with a vote, they're marks.

Here's a link to the "authorization card" Golberg references. Can you read the fine print? Better yet, would you have a chance to read it in the midst of an aggressive card check drive, when you're surrounded after work by three union goons demanding signatures?