Kansas City Star Endorsing, Exactly?

Yesterday the Kansas City Star published an op/ed piece from Judy Ancel, Director of Labor Relations at UMKC and the star of classroom video wherein she and others seemingly discussed violence and criminal activity as a means to an end, as first published on Big Government:

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Her piece:

Some Missouri Republicans have similarly dressed up their so-called Right to Work bill, SB 1, as a job-creation scheme, but it’s really a naked attack on the livelihoods of Missouri workers. It wouldn’t give anyone a job, and it has nothing to do with workers’ rights.

I’m going to disassemble some of this shortly, but why exactly is the KC Star publishing editorials from a professor who apparently believes that such tactics are OK and, when able to denounce such tactics on camera, does not?

Does the KC Star support such an ideology? I realize that they have a slight prog-ocialist bent, but her entire piece begs the question.

You can disagree about worker’s rights (I happen to believe in them and am against forced coercion into a group just so you can have a job that forcibly takes your money for political purposes) but the video shows something beyond the pale.

SB 1 backers say it’s about putting Missourians back to work, but if we look at the latest state to enact such a proposal — Oklahoma, which adopted it in 2001 — that just isn’t true. A study issued in March by the Economic Policy Institute found that since passage, Oklahoma lost a quarter of its manufacturing jobs. And contrary to what advocates promised, the number of firms moving to Oklahoma, which had been rising before 2001, began to fall after passage.

“Right to work” backers think it’s necessary for a state to be union-free to grow jobs. That’s code for being low-wage.

Again, incorrect and factually incomplete.

Right to work, or Employee Free Choice, gives the unions back to the actual union members, and not the elite 1% which controls and benefits the most from their hard work. Ancel advocates for the control and coercion of the unionized proletariat by the upper crust what directs them. She doesn’t believe that they should be allowed the freedom of choice by the top percent of union control. It’s completely antithetical to the narrative of liberty and choice that she presents.

For the sake of argument, we’ll look at another of Ancel’s “EPI” statistics (she gives no link):

Indeed, “right to work” does lower wages for all workers, not just union workers. Another Economic Policy Institute study found that wages in “right to work” states are 3.2 percent less than in other states. An average full-time, full-year worker in those states makes about $1,500 less a year than a similar worker in a state without “right to work” rules and is less likely to receive health insurance and a pension.

From the Mackinac Center for Public Policy:

According to the National Institute for Labor Relations Research of Springfield, Virginia, employees working in Right to Work states enjoyed a 42 percent higher increase in their real personal income from 1993 to 2003 than workers in forced-unionism states (37 percent, as opposed to 26 percent). Growth in non-farm employment is a whopping 69 percent higher (24.1 percent compared to 14.2 percent).

In the manufacturing sector, Right to Work states have enjoyed a 7 percent increase in plant growth from 1982 to 2001, while forced-unionism states have suffered a net loss. People are simply choosing to live, work and invest in states that allow them to keep more of their earnings. Forced-unionism states like Michigan are losing jobs to states that are providing people with the right economic incentives. Twenty-two states now have Right to Work laws.

[…]

It’s important to realize that labor unions are not the solution to lower income; they are the problem. Each year, they siphon hundreds of millions of dollars out of the pockets of workers and then spend it on manipulating the political process. Unless proper steps are taken, labor unions will continue to cause serious damage to Michigan’s economy.

From the National Institute for Labor Relations Research:

Between 2003 and 2008, private-sector jobs in the 22 Right to Work states increased by an aggregate 9.1%. That’s 2.5 times as great as the relatively small increase in private-sector jobs experienced by the 28 non-Right to Work states over this period. (See the tables on pages three and four for details.)

The correlation between a state’s Right to Work status and job growth is extraordinarily strong. Among the eight states with the biggest gains in private-sector employment over the past five years, seven – Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and North Dakota – have Right to Work laws.

The professor also ignores the correlation of higher-than-normal wages due to extortion and higher unemployment in states that do now have employee free choice.

Ancel also forgets that Missouri already has right-to-work protections for state and public employees. (There’s also this pdf of a Frank Luntz poll, among others I’ve seen referenced, which shows that the majority of union members want RTW in their state.)

It’s unfortunate that Ancel has to employ deception in order to push a narrative that is completely at odds with the free market system America was built upon. It’s also sad that Ancel pushes to enslave the American workers into a forced collective and does so by holding above their heads the reminder that they have to provide for their families somehow.

It amounts to nothing more than forced prostitution for the very thing against which unions were first organized to fight. And she’s teaching it at state schools with public funds – and almost lost her job when her program was cut. Fourtunately it looks as though enough communists progressives rallied to save it.

Does the Kansas City Star support such tactics by running her columns on its website? Curious.