Big Labor isn’t playing straight with Vermonters about Prop 3

This commentary is by Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee.

For 233 years, the Vermont Constitution has done two essential things: set up the framework of state and local government, and safeguard the individual rights of every citizen — free speech, due process and more — often more comprehensively than the U.S. Constitution. Many Green Mountain Staters would agree that’s exactly what a constitution is for.

Unfortunately, Big Labor special interests strongly disagree. They want to use the Vermont Constitution to entrench coercive legal privileges already afforded by making it nearly impossible for future lawmakers and statewide executives to revoke them.

That’s what Proposal 3 is all about. Effectively, it has two core provisions. One would enshrine in the Vermont Constitution the power of government union officials, but no other private citizens, to co-determine with elected officials or their appointees how civil servants are compensated and managed.

The other would similarly constitutionalize the power of private-sector union officials to get workers fired for refusing to fork over money to a union they may not want and never asked for.

Poll after poll shows compulsory union financial support is extremely unpopular with Americans, regardless of age, race, education, marital status or political affiliation.

For example, a 2024 nationwide survey conducted by RMG Research showed that 82% of registered voters agree that workers “should never be forced to join a union or pay dues to a union as a condition of employment.” The survey also found support for the right-to-work principle is overwhelming among Republicans, Democrats and independents, as well as among employed union members and union-free workers.

The Teamsters and other union bigwigs funding the so-called Yes on 3 campaign clearly know compulsory dues are not what the vast majority of citizens want. That’s why their description of what the measure would do fails to acknowledge that one of its key purposes is to ensure that, even if Vermonters elect pro-right-to-work legislative majorities and a pro-right-to-work governor, Big Labor’s power to collect union dues and fees as a job condition won’t be jeopardized. 

There is simply no credible justification for forcing employees to bankroll a union if they choose not to belong to it. Even some academic apologists for organized labor make no bones about the fact that workers whose productivity is above average typically get paid less when they are unionized.

A case in point is Richard Rothstein, now a distinguished fellow with the Big Labor-funded Economic Policy Institute, whose board includes the heads of major unions. In a brief survey of union-friendly academic literature on the impact exclusive union bargaining has on the pay of employees with diverse levels of skill and industriousness, Rothstein acknowledged that in unionized firms, the wages of lower-paid workers are raised above the market rate, with the increase offset in part by reducing pay of the most productive workers. 

There is no moral justification for denying employees who oppose unionization the choice not to bankroll a union. Nor are there any economic grounds for doing so. Public opinion and the facts are lined up against Big Labor’s goal of enshrining forced union financial support, on pain of termination, in the Vermont Constitution.

It’s not so surprising, then, that the advocates of Proposal 3 aren’t candidly stating that’s what it would do. But that’s the reality.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Big Labor isn’t playing straight with Vermonters about Prop 3.