Labor unions are turning into roach motels for generations of workers

With Kamala Harris giving her fawning media interviewers stale, programmatic talking points that tell voters nothing, the Trump side of the equation is brimming with new ideas — from draining the swamp, to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again, a fresh, welcome addition to the Make America Great Again agenda.

Old established ideas that nobody likes but nobody thinks about either are now being challenged, and that’s giving the Trump campaign its dynamism.

Here’s another one that can fit right into the Make America Great restoration: Requiring unions to recertify with the workers they purport to represent.

Sean Higgins, a former colleague at Investor’s Business Daily, now at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has a great new piece on just how badly this cleanup is needed.

He begins it this way:

Imagine if you lived in a country where a vote held decades previous determined which party held control of the government and people had little to no say over who ran the party. That’s the situation many workers must deal with if they’re unionized.

There are 7.4 million unionized private sector workers according to the Labor Department. Just under 5 percent of those workers voted in favor of the union that represents them according to an analysis of department data by the nonprofit Institute for the American Worker, a free market think tank. The vast majority of those workers joined workplaces that were already organized and have had to accept the union to keep their job.

The workers almost never get a chance to weigh in themselves. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the federal law covering union activity, does not require that a union ever have to reaffirm that it has the workers’ support once it is recognized. This is true even if none of the workers who originally voted for the union are still around.

Unions are only getting progressively less democratic. When the Institute for the American Worker ran the same survey back in 2016, the number of private sector workers who had voted for their union was 6 percent, a full point higher than it is currently.

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