Senator Ted Kennedy responds to the Wall Street Journal’s recent piece that among other things, exposed the coercive nature of "card check" union organizing. He brands the process "simple and fair," but maybe he should watch the video below, which we posted a few weeks back. The only thing simple about such campaigns is how unfair to employees they are. Read more in this letter to the editor from today.

Supporting free choice for employees would be the right thing to do, even if it didn’t have economic benefits, but fortunately there are significant economic advantages to Right to Work.

The chart below is from the cover story of the latest National Right to Work Committee newsletter, and shows that Right to Work states create new jobs more than twice as fast as forced-union-dues states.

In Upstate New York non-union workers were targets of a campaign of violence and intimidation by Operating Engineers Union Local 17 thugs:

The indictment accuses Local 17 leaders and members of dozens of threats and instances of vandalism and harassment against non-union workers and contractors. At times, members of other unions were also targeted.

Much of the activity took place at major publicly funded construction projects, including the expansion of Roswell Park Cancer Institute and renovations at Ralph Wilson Stadium, Buffalo State College and the Buffalo Sewer Authority’s treatment plant on Bird Island, prosecutors said.

One of the disturbing aspects to the case, in Flynn’s view, is that members of the local repeatedly used the Web site of the state Department of Motor Vehicles to find out the addresses of people they intended to harass.

Union members went to construction sites and took photos of the license plates of vehicles used by construction company executives or non-union workers, Flynn said.

“Then, they would use that information to find out where these people lived, and where their families lived,” Flynn said. “They would then make threats against people, mentioning their home addresses.”

At times the union officials’ actions seem to be out a script for a Hollywood mafia movie:

According to prosecutor Charles B. Wydysh, [union organizer] Larson had a conversation in 2003 with an official of a construction firm, STS. The conversation took place about two months after a union member had stabbed the owner of STS in the neck in an Orchard Park bar.

The STS representative is quoted in court papers asking Larson what his company would gain by hiring members of the union.

“What are the positives?” the company official asked Larson. “You guys slash my tires, stab me in the neck, try to beat me up in a bar. What are the positives in signing? There are only negatives.”

“The positives,” Larson answered, “are that the negatives you are complaining about would go away.”

Following up on the recent upheaval within the SEIU union, a group of nurses from Nevada have recently put out a video decrying the disconnect between rank-and-file nurses and the union hierarchy.

AFL-CIO top boss John Sweeney and Virginia AFL-CIO chief James Leaman recently had an article in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star that shows just how union officials view the workers they claim to represent.

The headline of the article rhetorically asks: "Without labor unions, who speaks for the worker?"

The implication is that workers are incapable of representing themselves. This also implies that workers who reject union membership are too stupid to know what is best for them.

That contemptuous view of workers and their ability to look after their own best interests explains why Big Labor is constantly claiming to have employees’ best interests in mind while trying to limit the ability of those very employees to exercise free choice when it comes to unionization.

According to the union boss mentality, forcing workers to be represented by the union (as happens nationwide under monopoly bargaining), forcing workers to pay dues to a union (as happens in non-Right to Work states), and eliminating the protection of a secret ballot (as happens in a card check drive), are all just ways of coercing workers into doing what the union bosses think is best for them.

With such a condescending view of the workers they want to represent, it is no wonder that when actually given the choice, fewer and fewer employees are choosing unionization. Unfortunately, the union bosses are intent on "solving" that problem by eliminating that choice.

This weekend legendary actor Charlton Heston passed away.

Heston, former president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) union, was a rare union official who supported the Right to Work.

As recounted in this article, Heston also led a group of actors who started a campaign in the early 1980’s to inform their fellow actors of the right to refrain from formal union membership as won in the National Right to Work Foundation’s Abood case:

Mr. Heston also aroused the ire of union leaders in Hollywood when he and a group of conservative SAG actors — who called themselves Actors Working for an Actors Guild — led a movement to educate Hollywood union members to the fact that they had the right — as upheld by the Supreme Court — to opt out of their unions by declaring "financial core" status. In non-right-to-work states such as California, declaring financial core status gives workers in unionized industries the right to opt out of their union’s politics while still requiring them to pay that portion of union dues that go directly towards collective bargaining, contract enforcement and contract administration.

Later, Heston himself resigned his formal SAG union membership in protest of a racist stance by SAG union brass:

Mr. Heston put his principles into action in 1991 when he declared financial core status in Actors Equity to protest the union’s refusal to allow a white actor — Jonathan Pryce — to play the role of a Eurasian in "Miss Saigon" on Broadway. Mr. Heston, who had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, called the union’s action "obscenely racist." He even flew to London to support an actor’s right to play any role without regard to race.

Charlton Heston was a champion of freedom who will be missed.

UPDATE: Here is video of Heston talking about the Right to Work principle from the Right to Work YouTube channel.

The Rocky Mountain News had an article this weekend on various proposed ballot initiatives in Colorado. The otherwise informative article concluded with this strange (and unsupported) sentence:

For the most part, states without right-to-work laws have higher levels of union participation, a statistic that some observers attribute to the popularity of unions rather than right-to-work laws.

The idea that the "popularity of unions" accounts for lower rates of union participation in Right to Work states, gets it entirely backwards and fails to understand just what a Right to Work law does.

Right to work laws do nothing to change the process through which a workplace becomes a union shop: a place where union officials have the power to forcibly represent every employee in the bargaining unit). Rather, they simply ensure that once a union is installed, no worker is forced to pay union dues as a condition of keeping or getting a job.

There are at least two ways that these Right to Work protections affect "union participation" rates:

1. Voluntary Participation. The most obvious reason is that in Right to Work states unions can’t force employees to pay dues or be fired. This lets employees decide for themselves if they think the union is worth the dues they are being charged. So it should come as no surprise that when employees are actually given a choice, it drives down union participation.
2. Big Labor’s Bottom Line. A second way in which Right to Work laws lower participation in unions is that they discourage (though not completely) Top Down union organizing. More and more drives for unionization are instigated by outside professional union organizers, as opposed to employee-led demands for unionization. But like the companies they try to organize, union officials are very aware of the bottom line, and they are always looking to maximize their revenue. Since for union bosses revenue means union dues, they realize that by targeting employers in states without Right to Work laws, they can maximize their haul because every worker – not just those who support the union – will be forced to pay up.

So contrary to what "some observers" say, there are at least two ways that protecting employees’ freedom to choose impacts union participation rates.

That’s what one person commented on YouTube about our latest video. Though sad, the sentiment is indicative of the mind set that led to such hostility against the employees in the video that simply exercised their Right to Work.

Unfortunately, history shows that it gets even worse.

Today’s Wall Street Journal points out that union officials are pouring upwards of a billion dollars, much of it in compulsory dues, into the 2008 election cycle. The goal? A sea change of American labor law.

"This is an all-in bet for them in 2008," says Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee, a group that fights down in the trenches against coercive union power. "As market cycles go, they’re in their peak, we’re in our trough, and they’re looking for a clear two-year run" in an all-Democrat Washington.

Then there’s the crown jewel:

Tucked into the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act is a provision called 14(b), which allows for "right to work" states. Big Labor last took a run at deleting this section, and forcing more unionization, in the Johnson administration.

Aside from abolishing employees’ free choice of whether or not to join or pay dues to a union, wiping the current 22 state Right to Work laws off the map would deal a crushing blow to the American economy.

According to a recent study by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, forced unionism cost the American economy upwards of $436 billion in GDP between 2000-2006 alone.

The yoke of compulsory unionism already takes a severe toll on states without Right to Work laws, the last thing America needs is to expand its reach.

View a new video by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation about the often brutal intimidation that employees face for exercising their Right to Work.

Sadly, while these employees suffered greatly, others often face far worse retaliation for refusing to walk off the job during a strike.