|
|
|
|
|
|
find employment. It simply reflects an attempt by employers to make the characteristics of the job suitable and attractive to employees. So long as there are many employers, all employees who have particular kinds of wants will be able to satisfy them by finding employment with corresponding employers. Under competitive conditions the same thing would be true with respect to the closed shop. If in fact some employees would prefer to work in firms that have a closed shop and others in firms that have an open shop, there would develop different forms of employment contracts, some having the one provision, others the other provision. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
As a practical matter, of course, there are some important differences between FEPC and right to work. The differences are the presence of monopoly in the form of union organizations on the employee side and the presence of federal legislation in respect of labor unions. It is doubtful that in a competitive labor market, it would in fact ever be profitable for employers to offer a closed shop as a condition of employment. Whereas unions may frequently be found without any strong monopoly power on the side of labor, a closed shop almost never is. It is almost always a symbol of monopoly power. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The coincidence of a closed shop and labor monopoly is not an argument for a right-to-work law. It is an argument for action to eliminate monopoly power regardless of the particular forms and manifestations which it takes. It is an argument for more effective and widespread antitrust action in the labor field. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Another special feature that is important in practice is the conflict between federal and state law and the existence at the moment of a federal law which applies to all the states and which leaves a loophole for the individual state only through the passage of a right-to-work law. The optimum solution would be to have the federal law revised. The difficulty is that no individual state is in a position to bring this about and yet people within an individual state might wish to have a change in the legislation governing union organization within their state. The right-to-work law may be the only effective way in which this can be done and therefore the lesser of evils. Partly, |
|
|
|
|
|