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Big Labor's Deceptive Move To Repeal New Right To Work Law Stopped Cold

This article is more than 6 years old.

Early this year, Missouri became the 28th state to enact a Right to Work statute, thereby preventing workers from being fired just because they won’t pay dues to the union that officially represents them. (It’s worth noting that very few of the workers who are in unions have ever had the opportunity to vote yes or no on union representation, a point Akash Chougule of Americans for Prosperity makes in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, “A Union Card Shouldn’t be an Heirloom.”)

As has been the case in every instance when a state has adopted Right to Work in recent years (Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, West Virginia, Kentucky), Big Labor has tried to derail the law and thus protect against any decrease in the inflow of dues money. Its tactic in Missouri was to use the state’s ballot initiative process to put the question before the voting public in next year’s general election.

Doing so is legally unobjectionable. The problem is that union forces attempted to kill the Right to Work law through vague, deceptive wording about the initiative measures.

In that effort, they were aided by Missouri’s outgoing Secretary of State (and unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate last year), Jason Kander. On his last day in office back in January, Kander approved the wording of ten ballot initiatives that had been drafted by the Missouri AFL-CIO. If any of these proposed amendments to the state constitution were to pass, then union forces could claim that the RTW statute was forbidden.

Rather than wording the petitions (which must receive a sufficient number of signatures in order to qualify for the ballot) so that voters could easily understand what the measures would mean, they were written in a deliberately confusing manner and Kander, who has received copious union support throughout his political career, obligingly approved them.

Here is the way one of them reads: “Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to: allow employers to have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives chosen by them and their employees; and allow an employer and employees’ chosen representatives to require that employees in a position represented by a representative of the employees’ choosing contribute a pro rata share of the representational costs?”

To most people, that murky language would seem to have something to do with to letting workers and employers choose to have collective bargaining and allowing workers contribute a share of the costs. But the right to join a union and impose collective bargaining is not in question – that is covered by the National Labor Relations Act.

The only question is whether the workers covered by union contracts will continue to be forced by pay dues as a condition of employment and nothing in the wording remotely suggests that. Clearly, the AFL-CIO and its allies thought their chances of success were better if the real intention of these initiatives was masked by misleading wording.

Three workers in the state (police officers Michael Briggs and Roger Stickler and nurse Mary Hill) filed suit to block the deceptively worded petitions. In that, they were aided by attorneys from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which assists employees in protecting their rights against compulsory unionism.

The case went before Missouri circuit judge Jon Beeten. On March 23, he decided in Hill v. Ashcroft that the wording was indeed deceptive and could not be allowed under state law. Judge Beeten correctly noted that voters need to know the essential context in which the initiatives were drafted and stated, “Because the summary statements do not provide this essential context, they are unfair and insufficient.”

Judge Beeten went on to provide a fair and sufficient summary: “Do the people of Missouri want to change the Constitution to remove the right to choose whether or not to join a union (‘right to work’) and allow union representatives to force an employee to make payments to a union as a condition of employment?”

That wording should leave almost no citizen unaware of the import of his or signature on a petition – Do you want to have a vote on keeping the Right to Work law, or go back to allowing compulsory union dues as a condition of employment?

Unions frequently resort to deception, trickery, and political favoritism to get their way (as I noted in this March article on the way the Service Employees International Union contrived to dragoon thousands of home health-care providers in Minnesota into paying dues to it) because a large majority of Americans do not believe that workers should be subject to forced unionism. When the issue is put clearly before them, most agree that whatever benefits unions might have, membership and payments should be voluntary.