Mark Mix wants you to spend Labor Day mad at the union steward instead of your boss. Mix runs the National Right to Work Committee, and in his recent Fox News column, It’s Labor Day, not Union Day, he lays out the pitch: unions are coercive, the PRO Act would force dues down workers’ throats, card check kills the secret ballot, “freedom of choice” is the right to opt out of representation. The framing treats the union as the threat and the boss as the neutral party just trying to run a business. The framing is backwards. The real coercion in an American workplace runs from the boss toward the worker, and it has been winning since roughly 1980.
Mix heads an organization whose explicit mission is to defund and defang private-sector unions. That doesn’t make him wrong about everything, but it tells you which side of the table he sits on, and it isn’t the worker’s.
The union is not a monopoly. A monopoly is one seller who sets the price. A union is many workers setting the price together. The thing in the actual labor market that acts like a monopoly is the employer — one company town, four firms controlling an industry, a hospital system that owns half the nurses in a region. Economists call this a monopsony. One buyer of labor, and the worker has nowhere else to go. That is the price-setter. That is what decides whether your kid’s dentist visit is in the budget.
No worker is compelled to take a union job. The compulsion runs the other way. Employers fire the lead organizer. They hold captive-audience meetings where workers sit through company-time propaganda and walk out past the same manager who writes their next review. They threaten plant closure. At-will employment means your boss can fire you for any reason that isn’t a protected category, and “I don’t like your face” qualifies. Non-compete agreements stop you from working in your field for a year after you quit. Mandatory arbitration waives your right to sue. Wage theft — unpaid overtime, stolen tips, off-the-clock work — the Economic Policy Institute estimates it at tens of billions of dollars a year, more than all street robbery combined. The penalty for an unfair labor practice under current law often costs the employer less than the parking ticket he wrote the worker that morning. That asymmetry is the coercion, and it predates the PRO Act by ninety years.
The 79% Rasmussen figure Mix cites is real and answers a different question than he wants you to hear. It asks whether workers should be “forced to join or pay dues as a condition of employment.” Of course they say no. They also wouldn’t want to be forced to fund a political party they oppose — which is exactly why dues spent on politics are already barred under the Beck decision and rebated to objecting members, not seized. Rasmussen is, not incidentally, the National Right to Work Committee’s preferred pollster, with documented right-leaning house effects. Even granting the number: the poll doesn’t ask whether the 79% would trade their union wage premium to be free of dues. Most of them would not.
Because the wage premium is real money. Bureau of Labor Statistics: union members’ median weekly earnings run about $1,400; non-union, about $1,170. That’s roughly $230 a week, around $12,000 a year, in the actual pockets of actual workers who carry union cards. The whole column is about what unions cost in dues. Nothing about what unions give in wages. Decide for yourself which is the relevant number.
The card-check provision Mix attacks exists because the secret ballot he romanticizes has been weaponized. Employers get the list of who signed authorization cards. They use the gap between signing and election to identify, isolate, and fire the organizers. Card check shortens that window. It does not abolish the vote — workers still decide, they just decide before the boss has had time to fire them all. The decertification “bars” he complains about are procedural cool-downs after a close election, designed to keep an employer from running a captive-audience campaign the morning after a union vote and demanding an immediate re-vote.
Right-to-work states — the policy Mix’s organization exists to spread — pay roughly 3% lower wages than non-right-to-work states, after the standard controls for region, race, and education. They also have weaker benefits, more workplace fatalities, and lower private-sector union density, which is the entire point of the policy. The freedom on offer in those states is the freedom to bargain individually against an employer who already knows your rent, your medical bills, and your next-best offer — which is to say, no freedom at all.
Mix reaches for Samuel Gompers, who stood for voluntarism. Gompers was also fighting in 1924, in an era when the open shop was the employer-funded campaign to break unions by any means available, including violence. “Voluntarism” in that context was a one-sided demand that workers be free to join while employers stayed free to fire them for joining. The 1924 Gompers framework has a counterpart today. It is being funded and run by the two organizations Mark Mix runs.
The PRO Act critique — that it would force compulsory dues, allow card-check intimidation, trap workers in unions they want to leave — is the column’s substantive complaint. The first claim is correct in the narrow sense: the PRO Act does override state right-to-work laws. The framing that this is “forcing” millions into unions is wrong. The PRO Act lets workers choose to organize. Either route — majority authorization cards or a secret-ballot election — requires that a majority of workers in the workplace want a union. The PRO Act doesn’t compel workers to form unions. It makes the employer’s job of defeating a union harder, by limiting the captive-audience meetings and forced arbitration current law allows. Right-to-work laws are what make the union’s job of sustaining itself impossible — requiring it to represent the entire bargaining unit while collecting dues from only the members. That’s not worker freedom. That’s employer subsidy.
Mix is right about one narrow thing: corrupt union locals exist, and unresponsive hierarchies are a real complaint. Workers should have fast, fair decertification paths, and the PRO Act preserves them. The bill is not a one-way ratchet.
The disagreement is not over whether workers should be free. It is over who the coercion actually falls on, and what Labor Day should honor — forty more years of declining worker bargaining power, or the institution that built the American middle class in the first place. American wages have stagnated while productivity has roughly doubled since the 1970s. The structural mechanism that converts productivity into wage gains — collective bargaining across whole industries — was systematically dismantled.
The Nordic countries solved the funding question a generation ago. In Denmark, sectoral agreements cover roughly 80% of the workforce; workers get the wages and conditions negotiated by the union whether or not they are members. In Germany, workers sit on corporate boards, and the economy did not, in fact, slide into the sea. Here, about 10% of workers carry a union card and roughly 11% are covered by a contract.
Build that. Raise NLRA penalties so firing an organizer costs more than the legal bill to do it. Ban captive-audience meetings. Give workers first-contract arbitration so an employer cannot negotiate a union out of existence by starving it through endless first-deal delay. The voluntary-membership principle Mix is worried about has been solved in American cooperative life a hundred times. Credit unions are member-owned financial co-ops with roughly 145 million members. Rural electric cooperatives keep the lights on across 56% of the country’s landmass. ESOPs put workers in the seat of the firm, and that one is bipartisan. The free-rider problem has a hundred American answers. The PRO Act is the labor-market version of the same instinct: when the institution works for everyone in the unit, the institution deserves to be funded.
On Labor Day, name the actual villain. It is not the dues. It is not the organizer. It is the boss who has been quietly taking more than his share of every working hour since 1980.