The Freedom of American Workers
According to the Korea Times:
Labor unions claim to speak for workers. But workers most prosper when they are free. Although American workers are generally much freer than their European counterparts, the degree of freedom varies across the U.S.
Unions once accounted for more than a third of the workforce. Today only 12 percent of workers, and 7 percent of private employees, belong to unions.
As economic opportunities have increased, American workers have demonstrated that they prefer freedom to the regimentation that comes from organized labor.
Organized labor's preference for regulated rather than free markets has resulted in an emphasis on capturing government employees. Indeed, unions are gaining market share only where there is no competition, efficiency is irrelevant, and outcomes are determined politically.
Unfortunately, unions are working overtime to apply government principles to the private marketplace. Notes Brian Johnson of the Alliance for Worker Freedom, most ``troubling is the recent swarm of policy that seeks to invade workers privacy, carve out specific niches for unions to proliferate, and seek to define the labor market with command-and-control legislation."
These, plus the plethora of proposed market interventions, ``undermine the free market and attack employee liberty at every chance."
However, the U.S. remains a federal system, so the impact of organized labor varies greatly by state. To measure worker freedom, the Alliance for Worker Freedom recently released the Index of Worker Freedom (IWF)...click to continue.
