Last week the Republican-controlled Michigan House and Senate passed legislation banning the closed union shop. What it basically does is make it illegal to require someone to belong to the union in order to work at a unionized employer. I'd like to touch on the reasons why the closed shop is reasonable and justifiable.
The most often-cited justification is to stop the unfair practice of "free riders." Since negotiated wages, benefits and safe and healthy working conditions are enjoyed by all the workers, it is unfair for some to reap the rewards without contributing through their membership and dues to the cost and support of bargaining for them.
A second reason comes from the idea of the corporation as a cooperative endeavor in which management and labor each have roles and responsibilities to the organization. The company cannot operate without both. Opponents of union shop often say they stand for the freedom of workers to choose. They like to call such laws as recently passed in Michigan "right to work laws." A better frame of reference might be "corporate servitude laws." When a person hires into a firm there are always a number of requirements involved. The prospective employee doesn't get the freedom to tailor everything to his or her own personal wishes. A host of such issues as hours, pay, breaks, vacation policies, sick leave, retirement benefits, discipline procedures, scheduling and the work to be performed are all part of the package. When you hire in you are accepting all of the above. To say that the worker has no freedom with regards to what management wants but freedom only in what their fellow workers want smacks of the authoritarian mindset toward which that view is slanted.
Finally, the union shop can only exist where it is democratic and contractual. Unlike the corporation, the union is a democratic organization. It must be voted in by the workers and the contracts it negotiates for them must be democratically approved by their votes. When union shop arrangements are in place they exist because they have been negotiated and accepted by both sides and ratified by a vote of the workers. The result is a contract, a binding agreement on both sides with the force of law. Consequently, to pass laws like Michigan's is to restrict the freedom of labor and management to negotiate conditions of employment, to subvert the force of a contract and to obviate the democratically expressed voice of the workers.
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