Progressivism
Linda Chavez reminds us that a great deal of the Union-backed protest in Wisconsin is in support of very undemocratic organizations.
Republicans should question why anyone should be forced to join -- or pay dues to -- an organization against his or her will. Unions should be voluntary organizations whose members willingly pay dues because they believe the organization provides a service they support. . . .
Why should unions be different from other organizations? You're free to join the AARP, AAA, or the ACLU, but those organizations have to solicit your membership, and you'll pay dues only so long as you believe you're getting your money's worth.
Moreover, she notes that, under current law, Unions are forever. Wisconsin wants to change that. Under current law:
Once a union has been certified to represent the employees, future workers are excluded from ever deciding whether they still want union representation unless they win a decertification election. And the rules to decertify the union are stacked against employees who want change.
Wisconsin would change the rules, ensuring that workers have the right to recertify their union regularly. What's democratic about a labor organization whose legitimacy is not recertified by periodic elections? Yearly recertification might be rather more regular than is necessary. Three to five years sounds better to me.
The Unions also want to abolish the secret ballot in the cerfication process. Not exactly what democracy looks like, is it.
Of course, this IS what 'democracy looks like': mob rule. Democracy is, after all, the dictatorship of the majority. Praise God the Founders, in their Scripture-soaked wisdom, didn't give us a democracy; they gave us a Constitutional Republic, whose “...Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other...” (and the term 'religious', at that time, referred to theologically conservative Protestant Christians).
Of course, as we've long since given up on following the Constitution in any meaningful way, we're probably headed for 'democracy', too. This does not end well.
If unions were voluntary, then having membership in the union fall to less than 50% would effectively mean that less than half the workforce wished to be in the union. If the majority of workers in a workplace are not interested in joining the union representing that workplace's employees, that union should lose its certification for that workplace. Future workers can always opt to rejoin or reform a union.
Free to join, free to disband: liberate the workers from union oppression if it does represent their interests to their satisfaction. As things are, in some jobs, a worker will find it much easier to divorce his wife than to divorce himself from his union and keep his job. That's crazy.
Why isn't every state a "right to work" state?