Republicans Fighting Their Own Right-To-Work Measures?

by: warner todd huston | published: 05 11, 2011

The Associated Press is reporting that resistance to right-to-work laws is coming from a surprising source in many states where the legislation has been lately introduced. It seems that Republicans themselves are divided on the efficacy of right-to-work laws and are busy obstructing other Republicans that are for such laws.

AP notes that only one state, New Hampshire, which has newly introduced the bill, has seen it pass the legislature but even that state still might find the thing vetoed by a Democrat governor. In several other states Republicans are bickering over the law stalling passage.

Maddeningly, AP reports that, "some Republican lawmakers who represent more heavily unionized areas have teamed up with Democrats to protect unions from the legislation." Certainly Democrats that have for decades had their hands in the union till are against a right-to-work law, but that these liberal Republicans are also reticent to pass the economy-spurring law is infuriating.

This isn’t any new idea, either. Already 22 states have right-to-work laws and it is no coincidence that these states are the ones that have seen economic success in comparison to those states that do not have such laws.

One of the important things that right-to-work laws do is to stop unions from forcing employees to join unions as a condition of being allowed to work in their chosen profession. Another thing that these laws do is stop governments from automatically taking dues money out of paychecks forcing unions to charge union members directly for dues -- as it should be.

This is a great boon to taxpayers who are no longer forced to pay for the accounting and record keeping efforts that government is responsible for when government takes dues out of paychecks for the unions. If collecting dues isn't the job of unions, then who’s job is it? Why are taxpayers forced to pay for the accounting efforts to collect union dues?

Of course, the reason that unions want government to automatically deduct union dues from employee's paychecks is because when government collects dues for unions the unions are sure to get their dues money right away. You see, once unions are forced to go directly to their own members to collect dues money, those members begin to get a tad behind in payments -- after all, no one wants to pay dues. This heavily cuts into the bottomless pot of money that unions are used to spending.

… and that is another good thing about right-to-work laws!

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