The Rocky Mountain News recently published a misleading op-ed by union organizer James Hansen. The article contains a number of misleading claims, but the following passage’s description of a Right to Work law is so fundamentally wrong that it has to be addressed:

“A right-to-work [sic] law would allow the government to intervene in labor-management relations, undermining the freedom that employers and workers now have to negotiate the best agreement possible for both sides.”

Union officials in Colorado already have government granted power to force every employee – member or not – to pay union dues as a condition of keeping their job (or getting a job in the first place). No other organization or association is allowed to extort forced fees from individuals.

State Right to Work protections simply eliminate this extraordinary government intervention, which is the exact opposite Hansen’s claim.

Further, if Hansen was really concerned with government intervention into employer-employee relations, he would call for the repeal of government imposed monopoly bargaining (that allows union officials to forcibly represent every employee) or the numerous other special government-granted powers that unions have.

But contrary to Hansen’s assertion, union officials are not at all concerned about preventing government intervention into employee-employer relations, as they long ago rejected AFL-CIO founder Samuel Gompers’ call for purely voluntary unionism. For the better part of the last 100 years, union bosses have built their empire on special government-granted powers, with forced dues as the most glaring example of the power.