Protecting Workers: AG Abbot right to fight forced membership in labor unions

With Labor Day just a few weeks away, Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbott has taken on a federal workers’ union that allegedly has been forcing Border Patrol detention guards to join as a condition of working for the agency.

Abbott has filed a lawsuit against the Security, Police and Fire Professionals of union and America Asset Protection and Security Services L.P. and of Corpus Christi, which provides security services to several federal facilities in the state, including the Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Bayview. The federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement runs the local facility.

The lawsuit accuses the union and the security company of violating the state’s right-to-work law. Texas is a right-to-work state, meaning that workers can’t be forced to be members of labor unions against their will.

Some states do allow unions to wield absolute authority in many work sites, where they often determine who gets promotions, overtime hours and other perks, regardless of the workers’ relative qualifications, productivity or work history. This is one reason some unions have become king-making operations rife with corruption — even to the point of being fronts for organized crime.

Of course, many if not most labor unions work honestly to secure the best working conditions possible for their membership. Organized groups of workers have more strength when dealing with management over wage structures, equipment and job protections. Texas and other right-to-work states allow workers to unite, and to employ unions to forge collective bargaining agreements and represent their interests.

Texas and other right-to-work states, however, correctly recognize the right of individual workers to eschew union representation if they wish, and make individual working arrangements with their employers.

It can’t be denied that labor unions have done much to improve conditions for American workers throughout our nation’s history. Their work is responsible for many of the laws that help protect workers from unsafe conditions and discrimination.

When unions begin requiring that people join and pay union dues as a condition for employment, they are depriving workers of some of the very rights for which their predecessors fought — namely, the right to assert their own needs and wants, and to negotiate individual working terms with their employers.

— The Brownsville Herald