The Cost, not the Cure
Chris Brooks has an excellent piece in the new issue of New Labor Forum that grapples with the question of whether unions should cede exclusive representation if the country goes “right-to-work.” As the title of his article, “The Cure Worse than the Disease: Expelling Freeloaders in an Open-Shop State,” suggests, he’s against it: Ceding exclusive representation to “kick out the scabs,” as Richman would have it, might be okay for a high-functioning local with high union density, but a union with 60 percent membership is likely to create an entrenched, adversarial minority. A union representing Geoghegan’s “40 percent, or 30, or fewer” can easily succumb to being nothing more than a marginal minority. So long as unions are treated as third-party vendors of services, as Fisk and Sachs describe them, then it will be easy for yellow unions to provide the same insurance, professional development, and discounted movie tickets at […]