The Right to Join

Professor Petro cuts straight through the current rhubarb about organized Labor. The real trouble, he finds, is coercion of workers by the unions

Reinhold Niebuhr has recently said that any proponent of right-to-work laws must be either a knave or a fool. And the Rev. Jerome L. Toner, O.S.B., Dean of Industrial Relations at St. Martin’s College, lays down essentially the same charge in more extensive fashion. He says that the right-to-work laws are “public frauds,” and that the title itself involves an unforgivable abuse of language. But Father Edward A. Keller of Notre Dame has taken a different view in a comprehensive analysis of the subject. Lacking canonical authority, I am confined to dealing with the issue in terms of logic, law, history and, to some extent, economics.

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Sylvester Petro

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Professor Petro cuts straight through the current rhubarb about organized Labor. The real trouble, he finds, is coercion of workers by the unions

Reinhold Niebuhr has recently said that any proponent of right-to-work laws must be either a knave or a fool. And the Rev. Jerome L. Toner, O.S.B., Dean of Industrial Relations at St. Martin’s College, lays down essentially the same charge in more extensive fashion. He says that the right-to-work laws are “public frauds,” and that the title itself involves an unforgivable abuse of language. But Father Edward A. Keller of Notre Dame has taken a different view in a comprehensive analysis of the subject. Lacking canonical authority, I am confined to dealing with the issue in terms of logic, law, history and, to some extent, economics.