Mitchell’s take on unions impractical

To the Editor:

Charles Mitchell, president and CEO of the conservative Commonwealth Foundation (“Supreme Court restores government workers’ rights,” July 15), takes a remarkably foreshortened and impractical view of nearly a century in the history of American labor organizing.

It is clear that Mitchell would much rather have the weak and dependent company union model — where the only unions organized by a company were organized by management and whose officers were completely dependent on company management for their positions of relative power and support — than that of independent union organization, which was dependent only on the workers.

The problem with the company union model is that it does not work. When company unions were in vogue, workers could not count on their union to protect them from vindictive supervisors and sexual predators in the work place. More importantly, ideas from the shop floor could be ignored by the company, even when these ideas led to productivity or safety improvements that made the company more profitable. When the Wagner Act allowed union contracts to demand universal deduction of dues, pay levels were of such levels that shop floor workers could plead real poverty, and mandatory deduction of dues were an imposition. But the possibility of wage progress from an independently organized union workplace provided motivation to those same workers to demand a union shop.

The so-called coercion in the Janus case is the same coercion that occurs after any majority vote. Some people do not get everything they want but walk away gladly with union wages.