The Mackinac Center’s partnership with the Institute for the American Worker was on full display in June when we debuted a groundbreaking joint study at a congressional hearing.
Steve Delie, the Mackinac Center’s former director of Labor Policy, wrote the report, “Misread: How Legal Authorities Allowed Tyranny of the Minority to Subvert Worker Enfranchisement.” Its major point: Policymakers and judges have long ignored the clear meaning of the nation’s most significant federal labor law, enabling unions to organize workers with only a fraction of employee support. Congress, the courts, and the executive branch can restore the right meaning of the National Labor Relations Act. That way ensures that a majority of workers at any worksite can make their voice heard before any union gets monopoly power to speak for them.
I testified at the congressional hearing about the report. Rep. Bob Onder, who has worked with me as a Missouri legislator and now as a member of Congress, held up a copy of the study for all to see and entered it into the Congressional Record. It was a strong endorsement of our work — and a sign that these ideas are being translated into action.
It’s easy to see why Onder and his colleagues have rallied around this study. A majority of workers must support a unionization for any organizing election to be valid. This is what the National Labor Relations Act requires. But since the late 1930s, the NLRB and judges have allowed a minority of workers to control the fate of all their colleagues.
Unions are more than capable of clearing the majority threshold, winning roughly 60% of the time. But many unions win elections they ought to lose. In some cases, a mere 20% to 30% of workers force unionization on their colleagues. In at least once case, barely 11% made the call. But the law is clear: More than 50% of the workers in a bargaining unit need to vote for a union before that union can gain monopoly bargaining power. I’ve written about this injustice in The Wall Street Journal and collaborated with Delie for a piece in National Review.
Onder has introduced the Worker Enfranchisement Act to right this wrong. It would require a two-thirds quorum of workers to vote before a union could organize. The study gives intellectual ammunition for the Trump administration, Congress or the courts to restore the right meaning of federal law and give workers what they deserve.
