By Mark Rhoads -
Over the last century, there are many good things to say about the individual men and women who dedicated their lives to helping improve wages, benefits, and conditions for workers through the American trade union movement. But the culture of Union coercion and anti-worker freedom is not one of them. The real problem in recent years has never been about workers or unfair labor practices by greedy employers. The central problem is that too many older union leaders are trapped in supersitions from the year 1935 and the year now is almost 2013.
Americans now live in a much more competitive world economy and must adjust to that new reality. No matter how many angry mobs scream "free rider" at younger workers who see little value in their compulsory union dues, the new hard reality of global competitiion does not permit us to live in the past industrial age.
Older union leaders who prosper by being parasites on the forced dues of real workers, passionately do not like the fact that Michigan voters approved a referendum in November in favor of right-to-work legislation that the state legislature and Gov. Snyder have now followed as their guide. But as Charles Krauthammer pointed out yesterday, this is an adjustment to the new reality.
