Rubio And Rokita's RAISE Act Restores A Little Bit Of Freedom In Labor Relations Law

Forbes ^ | February 25, 2015 | George Leef

[reaganaut1]

Should workers have the freedom to make their own contracts?

Long ago, they did. Back in 1905, the Supreme Court held in Lochner v. New York (which I discussed recently on Forbes) that the state could not dictate to bakery employees how many hours they were allowed to work in a week.

Unfortunately, freedom of contract is one of those rights that “progressives” and collectivists regard as unimportant – one that legislators and bureaucrats can whittle away as long as they claim that doing so somehow advances “the public good.” One of the many federal statutes that interfere with freedom of contract is the National Labor Relations Act.

Under that law, once the government has certified a union because it seems to have majority support, it becomes the exclusive representative of all the employees in the “bargaining unit.” No one is permitted to contract with a different union; nor are workers allowed to negotiate on their own if they think they can do better than the union’s collective agreement. While the language of the statute does not specifically prohibit individual agreements, in a 1944 case, J. I. Case Co. v. NLRB, the Supreme Court held that the NLRB had correctly ruled an employer in violation of the law by dealing individually with some workers and granting them pay increases.

By 1944, the Supreme Court was composed entirely of justices favorable to the New Deal’s socialistic philosophy and the resulting decision (written by Justice Jackson) made it plain that individual rights could be extinguished if politicians thought that doing so advanced the collective good. Justice Jackson wrote that even if deserved, increased individual compensation “is often earned at the cost of breaking down some other standard thought to be for the welfare of the group

[Rusty0604]

Unions will convince their members this is unfair and they will protest. Most union workers think just showing up for work is all they should have to do.

[SunkenCiv]

Recap — If Walker is the POTUS nominee, Rubio could easily be his running mate; if Cruz (or Bush) is the POTUS nominee, Walker could be his running mate, but (in the case of Cruz) actually so could Rubio.