Everyone knows the United Auto Workers helped bankrupt General Motors and the entire Detroit auto industry, helping pull what was once America’s greatest city into decay and poverty.
That legacy is, of course, one reason why Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., resisted the union’s overtures: The UAW lost its February election bid at the plant 53 percent to 47 percent.
But the union’s post-election actions have shown it to be something more malevolent than just a misguided organization trying to fit an early 20th-century labor model over a 21st-century industry.
The UAW is a threat not just to prosperity, but to liberty.
As a journalist I have written much on these issues that the union has disliked. And so I find myself subject to a legal attack: Last week I was issued a subpoena by the National Labor Relations Board (at the behest of UAW lawyers), commanding me to appear at a hearing today in which the union is asking the board to invalidate the Chattanooga election due to “outside” interference. (The demand also names my colleague Grover Norquist and my assistant, Tucker Clare Nelson.)
The subpoena also demands that I hand over all documents and communications relating to the UAW going back to January. Were I to comply, it would jeopardize the sources of information that allow me to report on this issue.
It amounts to an assault on the freedom of press: The union is actually asking the government to shut us up.
In fact, the UAW is mounting attacks on every clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits restrictions on “freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”
The union wants Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Gov. Bill Haslam and other representatives of the state to be punished for speaking out on the issue of UAW representation in Chattanooga. If the NLRB agrees that these politicians had no right to speak out publicly, and therefore invalidates the election, the union will have effectively silenced the people’s representatives by bureaucratic fiat.
The frightening precedent would be as follows — the federal government has the power to decide who may speak, what they can say, and when.
And what of the right to assemble? Freedom of assembly is a foundation of all free institutions. Dictators the world over, on taking power, have first moved to crush the people’s ability to associate as they like.
The VW workers in Chattanooga decided among themselves how they wish to associate; by a vote of 712 to 626, they elected not to associate with the UAW. Yet the union is petitioning the government to invalidate that election.
The UAW is openly contesting the freedoms of speech, press and association because the union is in terminal decline. Thanks to its feeding off the Detroit auto industry, its membership has plummeted 74 percent in the last 30 years. It desperately needs a new victim to drain, and Chattanooga’s gleaming Volkswagen facility has proven too alluring of an enticement.
It needs new dues-paying members. It needs them at any cost, even if that cost is our freedom. It’s willing to ignore the expressed wishes of workers, even as it claims to speak for workers. And it wants the federal government to tell everyone who thinks otherwise, from a US senator to a humble journalist like me, to shut up and butt out.
The UAW bosses want the federal government to erase the First Amendment in the heart of America.
How dare they.
Matt Patterson is executive director of the Center for Worker Freedom at Americans for Tax Reform.