Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and the National Right to Work Committee, issued the following statement on the occasion of Labor Day 2022:
Today, we should remember that Labor Day is about celebrating the determination and ingenuity of America’s workers and the importance of protecting workers’ individual rights. Vital among these is every American worker’s Right to Work: the freedom to decide to join or financially support a union, or refrain from doing so.
Unfortunately, union officials will attempt to steal the spotlight on Labor Day to drum up support for their coercive political ideas, almost all of which involve blatant infringements of the Right to Work. Big Labor and its political allies like Joe Biden claim that workers favor unions and that union officials should be granted nearly unlimited power to sweep workers under union control.
This fiction is false and incredibly damaging to workers’ freedom. The truth is, the average unionized worker is more likely to be involved in an effort to vote out an unpopular union than a non-union worker is to be involved in a campaign to install one. Even so, union officials are making a full-court press both in Congress and at executive agencies to eliminate state Right to Work protections and force millions more workers across the country to pay union bosses just to stay employed, and to make it even harder for workers to vote out a union they don’t want.
Defending worker freedom is a better way for American workers, and the evidence for this is abundant. The last decade saw the number of states that protect Right to Work grow to a majority, and employees have been flocking to Right to Work states to take advantage of the economic opportunity and prosperity supported by Right to Work laws. As of last year, a majority of American workers live in states where the Right to Work is safeguarded.
Right to Work finds support with the vast majority of Americans year after year because it is a common-sense moral principle with clear benefits to workers and their families. In the midst of continued economic uncertainty and unprecedented union power grabs, we have a duty to make sure that workers’ fundamental rights are protected. Let’s remember that this Labor Day and continue to fight for worker freedom.
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a nonprofit, charitable organization providing free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses. The Foundation, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-336-3600, assists thousands of employees in about 200 cases nationwide per year.