Posts tagged John Locke Foundation
Darn good policy’ George Leef on Right to Work and Rethinking Higher Education
April 20, 2025 // While acknowledging some setbacks — “Michigan being key among them” — Leef remains optimistic. “Union membership keeps shrinking. The union clout, I think, is less than it used to be,” he attests. Leef attributes this to a growing awareness among workers that, “unions don’t always represent the people they claim to; they’re oftentimes lining their own pockets.” Leef argues that labor relations were healthier before federal interference. “In our early history, people could sign up if they wanted to, or they were free to not sign up… Then the federal government stepped in and insisted that unions had some special right to represent workers,” he says.
Opinion: Liberate markets to help workers succeed
January 10, 2023 // From educational services and child care to transportation, housing, and health care, the Cato team offers sensible reforms that either eliminate barriers to opportunity or make it easier for individuals to spend public dollars in the way most likely to meet their particular needs. As Lincicome observes in the book’s conclusion, our political debate is filled with supposedly “pro-worker” proposals that are based on faulty assumptions about the past, present, and future of the American workplace. Far too many politicians think of workers as “helpless and in need of government protection from cradle to grave, despite the long‐term harms that such policies inflict on these very same workers and the economy more broadly,” he writes. “By contrast, pro‐market policies that respect the individual agency and ability of all workers would allow them to pursue their unique hopes and dreams in a more dynamic, diverse, and high‐wage economy—and to adjust to whatever comes next.”
Senators Introduce Employee Rights Act of 2022
March 25, 2022 // The Employee Rights Act of 2022 is also co-sponsored by Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Ranking Member Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), and Senators John Thune (R-South Dakota), John Barrasso (R-Wyoming), Mike Braun (R-Indiana), Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), Jerry Moran (R-Kansas), Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Steve Daines (R-Montana), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Mississippi), Bill Hagerty (R-Tennessee), John Boozman (R-Arkansas), Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), Kevin Cramer (R-North Dakota), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin). Representative Rick Allen (R-Georgia) is introducing companion legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Vincent Vernuccio: Time to celebrate and protect worker freedom
March 17, 2022 // A right-to-work law simply means that a union cannot get a worker fired for not paying them. In states without right-to-work laws unions can require private-sector workers to pay union fees just to keep their jobs.
N.C.’s Right to Work law turns 75, experts weigh in on workers’ rights
March 16, 2022 // The Right to Work law, approved in 1947, outlawed requiring union membership as a condition of hiring or of continued employment. It bans the idea of a “closed shop,” in which union membership is a necessary part of getting and keeping a job. The law also bans a “union shop.” In that scenario, an employer can hire nonunion workers, as long as those workers join the union within a certain period. The law also prohibits the mandatory collection of union dues by employers through payroll deductions.