Editors at the Washington Examiner highlight legislation that would restore worker freedom.
One early opportunity we identified was to reform the 83-year-old regimen of labor laws, which are obsolete for workers, who are their supposed beneficiaries, and survive only as a political weapon for the Left. We pointed out, for example, that workers’ freedom of association is seriously restricted by current law, something the Supreme Court confirmed this year when it forbade closed shops and compulsory union membership for government workers.
Congressional Republicans had the solution in their hands, the Employee Rights Act, and they had ample opportunity to advance it, to their own great political advantage. That’s why it is especially dispiriting, not to mention galling, that they have utterly failed to advance this excellent legislation. Republicans now plan on going into the 2018 midterm elections without even marking up the ERA in committee.
The bill would right many wrongs that Depression-era labor law inflicts on workers who live in the very different world of today. …
… What exactly is objectionable in any of this? How could it not be helpful for Republicans to force Democrats to put themselves on the record and vote against workers’ freedom of choice?
Republican failure on the ERA demonstrates a cowardice rather than courage in conservative convictions. At stake are freedom of association, free enterprise, and even freedom of speech, because unions continue to take money from workers while keeping them in the dark about their rights not to be misrepresented by invariably far-left union political activism.
