With Kamala Harris giving her fawning media interviewers stale, programmatic talking points that tell voters nothing, the Trump side of the equation is brimming with new ideas -- from draining the swamp, to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again, a fresh, welcome addition to the Make America Great Again agenda.

Old established ideas that nobody likes but nobody thinks about either are now being challenged, and that's giving the Trump campaign its dynamism.

Here's another one that can fit right into the Make America Great restoration: Requiring unions to recertify with the workers they purport to represent.

Sean Higgins, a former colleague at Investor's Business Daily, now at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has a great new piece on just how badly this cleanup is needed.

He begins it this way:

Imagine if you lived in a country where a vote held decades previous determined which party held control of the government and people had little to no say over who ran the party. That’s the situation many workers must deal with if they’re unionized. 

There are 7.4 million unionized private sector workers according to the Labor Department. Just under 5 percent of those workers voted in favor of the union that represents them according to an analysis of department data by the nonprofit Institute for the American Worker, a free market think tank. The vast majority of those workers joined workplaces that were already organized and have had to accept the union to keep their job. 

The workers almost never get a chance to weigh in themselves. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the federal law covering union activity, does not require that a union ever have to reaffirm that it has the workers’ support once it is recognized. This is true even if none of the workers who originally voted for the union are still around. 

Unions are only getting progressively less democratic. When the Institute for the American Worker ran the same survey back in 2016, the number of private sector workers who had voted for their union was 6 percent, a full point higher than it is currently.  

So, if you're stuck in a union, the odds are you probably didn't vote for that union to be there -- someone employed by the company years ago voted for them based on different circumstances, but you have to live with the consequences as an employee of a company with a union stuck onto them like a barnacle.

Only five percent of workers throughout the entire private sector voted for the union that supposedly represents them. Everyone else is their hostage, paying the extorted union dues whether they like or not, as a sort of ransom, yet never, ever, getting released.

Higgins describes how corrupt they have gotten, running off with workers' union dues, and paying themselves lavish salaries and benefits for sure. Think of the United Auto Workers and say no more.

What's more, it may not have been all workers years ago that voted for the union that's there. If even a small fraction of workers voted for a union over a smaller fraction that said 'no,' the union would be certified as a 'majority' of workers calling for it, even if most workers didn't vote at all.

That isn't enough for ravenous and greedy unions, though -- Higgins describes their continuous push for 'card check,' which gives workers even fewer rights than they have already. And if god forbid, a worker tries to decertify a union, they can do so only if ... the union as judge and jury ... agrees to it. 

Higgins didn't bring this up, but union dues, handed over involuntarily by workers, are one of the biggest sources of campaign cash for Democrats. Very little of this money ever makes its way to Republican coffers, but Democrats live and breathe union cash, handed over by the unwilling workers.

Democracy? You decide.

Higgins points out that there are moves in Congress to require unions to stand for recertification that ought to get passed:

The fact that so many workers have so little say is wrong. Congress should pass the Employee Rights Act, which would mandate periodic recertification votes, to give those workers a say in who represents them. Unions should exist to serve their members, not vice versa.

I can't think of any better way to either force the unions to defend the workers they claim they are defending, or just shut their extortion rackets down. Joining a union shouldn't be a roach motel act for all workers who come after. Workers should be able to get rid of bad unions and keep the money they earn.

Hat tip: Issues & Insights

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License