In the May 27 Chronicle of Higher Education, there is an article about a controversy over the formation of a faculty union at Carroll College in Wisconsin. This is a trifecta for me: I’m interested in higher education, labor policy, and I happen to have graduated from Carroll (which is the oldest college in the Badger State, a bit of completely useless trivia). It’s a subscriber site, but I’ll toss in the link anyway.

Some of the profs think they’d like union representation. The school is arguing that the Supreme Court has ruled that religiously-affiliated schools aren’t under the National Labor Relations Act for First Amendment reasons.

The root of the problem here is that hideous piece of legislation, the National Labor Relations Act. It creates a duty of mandatory “good faith” bargaining once a union is certified because it has majority support. The case again shows why it would be a lovely solution just to repeal the NLRA. Without it, any professors who wanted union representation would be free to join any union they wanted to, or start their own. Professors who didn’t want any part of it would be similarly free to ignore the union or unions desired by other profs. With no legal mandate to bargain over anything, the school might choose to bargain with the union or unions over some issues, but not others. Or it might say that it won’t engage in collective bargaining at all. No one could say what the result would be ahead of time, but it wouldn’t be the result of coercion.

The NLRA is another of those festering New Deal relics that ought to be surgically removed.