Today’s WSJ contains a letter from a union apologist who tries to make an argument against right to work laws. Here’s the letter:

Unsurprisingly, your editorial “Giving Workers a Union Choice” (Feb. 2) supports Republican attempts to destroy unions in Indiana and Wisconsin just as they’ve been crippled throughout the South. Voters want politicians to help create jobs and raise wages, but the corporate CEOs who put millions into the last election are looking for something else? political payback against a Democratic constituency. They want a misleadingly named “right-to-work” law passed to make it illegal for employers and unions to agree to require every employee who gets the benefit of union wages and benefits to help pay the costs of negotiations.

Right-to-work laws do not create jobs, but they do weaken unions and lead to lower pay and reduced pension and health-care coverage. Businesses seeking cheap labor will eventually move to Mexico or China, even from “right-to-work” states.

Attacking political opponents is a lot easier than creating middle-class jobs.

Ross Eisenbrey
Economic Policy Institute
Washington

Eisenbrey can’t or won’t tell the truth. A right to work statute does not “weaken unions.” It allows individuals who don’t want union representation or don’t want to pay for the union’s use of their dues money for purposes having nothing to do with the job an escape hatch. They can stop paying without losing their jobs. If a union does not want to lose those members, it can do what every other sort of voluntary organization does — work to persuade them that it is worth what it costs. Suppose we lived in a country with an established church and someone proposed allowing people the freedom to leave the church and not be taxed to support the established church. Would Eisenbrey gripe that such a law would “weaken the church”? Perhaps, but most of us can see that institutions that derive their strength from coercion are often corrupt and ought to be weakened.