Liberal writer Rick Perlstein in this column in current issue of The New Republic attacks (among many other things he calls “conservative”) my book Free Choice for Workers: A History of the Right to Work Movement.
To save you having to read the whole thing, Perlstein’s pertinent paragraph mentions my book, the jacket blurbs by the likes of William F. Buckley, Jr., then quotes the publisher’s media line that the book “chronicles the thrilling “David and Goliath” struggle between the bosses of Big Labor and the American citizens who oppose their lust for coercive power.” Perlstein then delivers what he regards as a fatal blow: “Somehow, the conservatives have even pulled off making Wal-Mart sound like the little guy.”
Several problems.
I never mention Wal-Mart, nor any “big business” favorably. In fact, big business has often been complicit with Big Labor in trampling on workers. Most of the book focuses on the stories of “little guys” such as construction workers and waitresses who didn’t feel like doing exactly as union bosses told them, and suffered for it. If Perlstein had gotten past the cover the book and actually read any of it, he would have learned that the nucleus of the right to work movement was railroad union members in the early 1950s who did not want to have union membership be made a condition of keeping their jobs.
What’s interesting is that Perlstein so readily dismisses opposition to the laws that sanction compulsory unionism as a worthless “conservative” issue. Why is it that left-interventionists are indifferent to union coercion? I submit that it’s because unions are good at uttering stock egalitarian phrases they swoon over, and because unions give loads of cash and manpower to help elect “liberal” politicians. That earns Big Labor a free pass. It’s just the same as when some conservatives turn a blind eye to human rights abuses of governments that are US government allies. I’m willing to bet that Perlstein would complain about that.
