In New Hampshire and other states where grass-roots efforts to prohibit forced union dues and fees are gaining momentum, union officials and politicians who aren’t normally known for their libertarian sympathies are suddenly appealing to ‘freedom’ to defend their ability to force workers to pay up or be fired.

For example, state AFL-CIO President Glenn Brackett recently penned an op-ed bitterly denouncing SB-61, legislation that would make New Hampshire America’s 28th Right to Work state, as “a blatant government intrusion into our free-market economy.”

In attacking Right to Work protections for the individual employee, Brackett completely ignores the fact that the pro-forced unionism National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), both in its original 1935 form and as amended by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, has egregiously restricted the freedom of employee and employers to bargain with each other for 85 years now.

Brackett also fails to acknowledge how the five-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which was established by the NLRA and administers the statute, and has nothing to do with state Right to Work laws, further encroaches on the freedom of contract.

In a 2015 column responding to similar expressions of faux libertarianism by union officials who were trying at the time to block Right to Work in West Virginia, attorney and Charleston Mail columnist Laurie Lin explained that the NLRA “restricts worker freedom by limiting what employees can do, apart from the union, to try to get a better deal from their bosses.”

And if you’re a private-sector employee in a state without a Right to Work law, the NLRA empowers union bosses to, in Lin’s words, “take a chunk of your paycheck whether or not you consent.”

For their part, employers are required under the NLRA “to negotiate with union officials – and only union officials.” Even if the employer would be glad to negotiate separately with workers who don’t want the union, and those workers have made it clear they would prefer to represent themselves, the NLRA treats such negotiations as labor-law violations punishable by fines and other penalties.

After citing these and other federal statutory as well as regulatory restrictions on employees’ and employers’ ability to manage their personal business as they choose, Lin concluded:

“If you support all these limitations on workplace freedom . . . it’s absurd to shout ‘freedom of contract!’ only when it comes to right-to-work laws.”

The fact is, the only restriction on the “freedom to negotiate” imposed by Right to Work laws is that they render contract provisions authorizing the termination of employees for joining and bankrolling a union, or refusing to do either, legally unenforceable.

If the entire NLRA were repealed, as the late Milton Friedman advocated, there would be no need for state Right to Work laws. Friedman believed that employers should be free to forge contracts prohibiting any employee from joining or paying dues to a union and also free to forge contracts requiring union membership and dues payment as a job condition.

This is an intellectually respectable and principled stance, albeit one to which very few Americans adhere today.

But it is in no way principled to support the NLRA limitations on the freedom of contract, as Brackett and other union bosses manifestly do, and at the same time attack Right to Work laws on supposedly libertarian grounds.

Union bosses and other advocates of Big Government who hypocritically denounce Right to Work protections for “intruding into our private business,” as Brackett does, “strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.” (Matthew 23:24, New American Standard Bible).

With SB-61 heading to the New Hampshire House of Representatives after being approved by the state Senate, Big Labor bosses will fight furiously to stop it. If they believe the law should authorize and promote the corralling into unions of employees who personally want nothing to do with a union, that is their prerogative.

But there is nothing remotely “libertarian” about their stance.

Stan Greer is senior research associate for the National Institute for Labor Relations Research.

Newsletter