Last week, Mark Mix, President of National Right to Work, pointed out in Investor’s Business Daily that the real issue in the ongoing battles between Big Labor and reform-minded public officials in various states across the country is getting lost in the union bosses’ self-serving rhetoric.

As Mix notes, given the media coverage of the battle in Wisconsin:

Americans learning about organized labor’s battles in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and other states from TV, radio and newspaper reports may understandably be confused about what is at stake, especially if they have no personal experience with unions themselves. From afar, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that public employees’ right to join a union is at stake.

Of course a worker’s right to join a union is not the issue at all. The real issue at stake is that Big Labor enjoys numerous government-granted special privileges at the expense of workers’ individual rights:

…What reform-minded elected officials are seeking to curtail, and in
some cases even abolish, is government union chiefs’ legal power to
force public servants into a union as a condition of employment.

Under the current labor laws of nearly half of the states, government union officials have been explicitly authorized to force all public employees in a workplace to pay union dues or be fired, as long as a majority of their fellow employees (among those expressing an opinion) support unionization.

Such forced-unionism laws, which Big Labor is now fighting furiously to keep on the books in the face of increasingly intense public opposition, actually trample on, rather than protect, employees’ freedom to make personal decisions about unionism.

And that’s the point. So next time you hear union bosses like Richard Trumka shouting about "protecting workers’ rights," it’s important to keep in mind that what he really means is "protecting union bosses’ special powers."