It is a shame that pundits to this day insist on equating free market reforms with racism and bigotry. The states-rights movement of the 1950's has matured into the Tea Party Movement of today, in which Americans of all races and backgrounds want more freedom -- for themselves and from their government.
Right to work laws are exactly that: laws enacted to permit individuals the right to work without joining a union. Businesses have the right to assemble peaceably, too, and that includes the option to hire workers who can choose not to join a union./
As a former teacher in Los Angeles, I resented the hold of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, who automatically took a portion of my salary out of my paycheck, regardless of the fact that I had not joined their collective. I also resented the union leadership's investment in political causes which I did not favor. Mr. Nichols writes about workers' rights to organize -- but what workers' rights not to join? What about my right to earn a decent wage without the involuntary garnishment, or rather legal theft of a portion of it to the public sector union?
Martin Luther King Jr. was a Communist sympathizer, too; a fact which many liberal hagiographers love to gloss over. Harry Bridges, Jr, one of the founders of the ILWU was also an adherent of Communism, a lethal ideology based on nothing but perpetual revolution at the expense of individual liberty and consumer freedom. Dr. King's moral equivalence comparing the oppressive regimes of Russia and China to the several states which permitted individuals to seek employment is beyond laughable --it is dangerous and unconscionable demagoguery.
"Democrats and Republicans in these states [the Great Lakes States and New England] recognized that strong unions, like strong businesses, were necessary to economic and social progress."
On the country, union shops limit workers and drive away businesses. Take the Port of Los Angeles, for example, where the International Longshore and Warehouse Union has forced international shipping firms to dock in foreign ports at least once before docking in the United States, as an attempt to maintain the competitive edge of American firms which rely on union manpower. The stalling in distribution and shipment has forced shipping firms to transfer their business to "right to work" locales like Prince Rupert Port in Vancouver or to invest in an alternative port at Punta Colonet in Mexico. There is also the widening of the Panama Canal, which will further cut into the ILWU's truck and traffic.
Nichols neglects to mention the illegal and unethical thuggery of unions, including the scab-raids during the 1935 West Coast strike that gave rise to Bloody Thursday. In contrast to brute force, "anti-union" forces in Wisconsin and through the Rust Belt relied on persuasion and the political process to reform collective bargaining in their states. Consumers and taxpayers have rights, too. Freedom of speech and assembly must not curtail the rights of the individual citizen to vote his Bible, his wallet, or his own political affiliations.
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