In
anticipation of an upcoming vote on Right to Work, an Oklahoma lawmaker is
proposing to use RTW as a springboard for a worrisome attack on the state’s
“at will” employment law. Representative
Opio Toure, D-Oklahoma City, is spearheading an attempt by some lawmakers “to
circulate an initiative petition to eliminate employment at will in Oklahoma,”
according to an April 10 report in the Tulsa
World. “As we have
contemplated it, an employee who has been on the job for a certain period of
time would have to receive a specified notice before being terminated,” he
said. According to Toure and his
allies, at will employment must be scrapped to insulate employees from their
wicked bosses in a not-too-distant Right to Work Oklahoma.
The
most baneful justifications for scrapping at will employment come from the
opponents of both Right to Work and at
will laws, who would have us believe that some sort of legislative tit-for-tat
is now in order to protect the “rights” of employees against the perceived
excessive power of employers. Yet
if one dares scratch beneath the shallow surface of the claims of lawmakers and
labor unions, common fallacies surrounding “rights”, “work”, and
“fairness” are easily refuted, and the moral case for both Right to Work and
at will employment can be made. And
that is precisely what needs to be done.
A
free market economy is by definition one in which force and coercion have been
abolished; the moral and necessary
role of government is in ensuring that it stays that way.
Right to Work is an attempt to remove legal,
not private, obstacles to an individual gaining employment.
In spite of the alleged “needs” of unions to protect “their”
shops (what the Dark Ages called fiefdoms), a job is a trade of goods and/or
services, and a trade, by definition, requires the consent of all parties.
If one party should find the terms of the trade unacceptable, they are
free to look elsewhere to satisfy their needs.
Right to Work merely says that the union, backed by the force of
government, cannot keep an individual from seeking terms with a potential
employer independent of the union, nor force him to give up part of his rightful
property to union coffers. Claiming
that this leaves individuals with no “protection” stands the concept on its
head.
Writing
in the essay Man’s Rights almost
forty years ago, Ayn Rand pointed out the obvious:
“There is no such thing as ‘a right to a job’—there is only the
right of free trade, that is: a man’s right to take a job if another man
chooses to hire him.” It will be
the great contradiction of our time should the state of Oklahoma embrace the
idea of the latter part—while chaining the person who makes that choice to the
person whom he hires, that is: by dismembering the state’s at will law.
The
purpose of all law should be to protect the rights of human beings. Far from “granting” to employers some “unfair
advantage” over employees, at will employment law serves the important moral
purpose of recognizing the converse of
the dreadful system of slavery abolished in this country by the Thirteen
Amendment, namely that a person offering a job should never be the slave of the
person accepting it. If one seeks
terms of trade with an employer, he ought not to be able to do so with a club in
his hand.
If
the person seeking work is unhappy with “at will” conditions, versus
contract employment in a particular work place then, as the saying goes,
nobody’s holding a gun to his head. He
is free, in every sense of the word, to seek terms with someone else.
Instead of supporting this environment, Rep. Toure and his colleagues
wish to interject the figurative gun into that relationship themselves.
In
what is perhaps an accidental admission of the true motivation behind his
proposal, Rep. Toure said that states with both Right to Work and at will
employment do “not afford the employee protection against unfair employers.” On the other hand, “An employee who has a union contract cannot
be fired unless there is cause shown for termination [emphasis added].”
Opponents of Right to Work are attempting to counter their likely defeat
on that issue by turning everyone in the state into a union worker, whether he
likes it or not.
In
claiming the moral high ground of “fairness”, opponents of both Right to
Work and at will employment are seeking refuge in a muddled, contradictory and
indefensible definition of what is fair. It
is this same interpretation of what is “fair” that has brought the
relationship between employer and employee to that condition where companies are
being sued for hurting someone’s feelings.
The
greatest tragedy is that so many of those on the right side of these questions
do not understand the moral premise at stake, and so are ill equipped to counter
the arguments of labor leaders and power-hungry politicians alike. Mike Seney, vice president of the Oklahoma State Chamber of
Commerce, pointed out that eroding at will employment would have “extremely
damaging” economic consequences. This
is certainly correct—an environment of compulsion is anathema to a productive
society, regardless of who holds the whip—but the whip is what needs to be
addressed.
Is
it fair to fire a man who has worked hard all his life, been on time everyday,
and obeyed the rules—just because? One
might just as well ask if it’s fair to refuse to hire him to begin with.
After all, when one seeks to use the law to, in theory, deny the person
who owns the job from having a say in the terms of employment, then one is
denying, in practice, that he owns the job to begin with.
Perchance, in the end, is it that
which Rep. Toure is pursuing?
04/10/01
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