This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Sunday, January 12, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

Unions are supposed to be the advocates for workers.

So what happens when unions are effectively

preventing public sector employers from doing the same thing? Ken Girardin is a

policy analyst at the Empire Center in New York. In Colorado Springs late last year we talked

about how employees and employers understand what they can and can't say to each other.

Unions position themselves as the advocates of workers, right?

Like in a workplace, they're your advocate.

And it's difficult based on law sometimes for an employer to do any advocacy on behalf of their

own workers because the union said no no no we got this.

Employers face a very interesting challenge in the public sector in that the

laws governing their labor relations are some of the only laws that you can risk breaking just by talking about them. So in New York, for

instance, we have a section of state law that says that people have the right to

join or not join a public sector union. They have protections from retaliation regardless of their choice, but we have public employers who are afraid to talk about that section of the law for fear of being seen as anti-union and facing charges.

Okay, so what does that look like in practice?

The result is that no one ever tells people that they have the right to choose whether or not to join a union.

No one ever explains to them how a union contracts works and they get approached by a union officer at some point and in some case pressured to sign a membership

card and they don't think twice about it. Where does that leave public sector

employers who would like to provide any kind of advocacy on behalf of their

on behalf of their workers in the area of the law.

Earlier this year the Empire Center developed a program called Do's and Don'ts, where we developed a guide

letting employers know exactly what they can say to their new employees and to their current employees.

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