by George C. Leef, Posted February 18, 2009

American labor law is a dank miasma of special-interest legislation that tramples on the rights of some citizens in order to advance the interests of others. The main beneficiaries are labor-union officials who lobbied for and received extraordinary and unique powers from compliant politicians. The victims are business owners and workers who prefer to have nothing to do with unions.

Even with their powers, however, union officials have seen a steady decline in the popularity of their “product” ever since the 1950s. The percentage of workers in the private sector who are unionized has fallen from 36 percent in 1953 to less than 8 percent today. (Unionization among government employees has, however, grown considerably over time. That shouldn’t be surprising, since government agencies don’t have to worry about inefficiency and competition.) Naturally, union officials have decided to look to politics for salvation. This year, they spent lavishly in an effort to get Congress to pass a bill with the exceptionally misleading title “Employee Free Choice Act.”

That effort was defeated in the Senate last year, but the bill will undoubtedly be introduced again and again by politicians who wish to curry favor with Big Labor.

Since most people know little about labor law, it’s worth taking some time to examine it and the proposed changes and to compare both with what the ideal law regarding labor unions would be — ideal, that is, from the libertarian standpoint of protecting the rights of all people equally.

Read the rest of this in depth analysis at Freedom Daily.

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