Beech Tree News Network

Americans fundamentally believe in liberty, which means you shouldn’t be forced to join a union and pay dues just to get – or keep – a job.

Workers in 24 other states already enjoy such freedom. However, in our state, 95,000 Kentuckians in the private-sector workforce are still forced to join up and pay as much as 2 percent of their paychecks in dues.

While a statewide right-to-work law has a higher mountain to climb in Frankfort after November’s midterm elections in which some key races were won by opponents of such freedom, there’s more than one path to greater individual freedom and increased prosperity across the commonwealth.

That journey could begin at a county courthouse near you.

A hidden highlight discovered in Kentucky law is called the “County Home Rule” passed by the General Assembly in 1978 that:

 - delegates to county fiscal courts the legislature’s authority to promote economic development and regulate commerce

  - allows county fiscal courts to approve policies not expressly prohibited by the legislature

The law described in KRS 67.083 contains language providing local county governments “with the necessary latitude and flexibility to provide and finance various governmental services” within certain areas, including the “regulation of commerce for the protection and convenience of the public;” and “promotion of economic development of the county, directly or in cooperation with public or private agencies.”

Right-to-work fits the “County Home Rule” like the Wildcats fit in Rupp Arena. It protects workers from losing their jobs for refusing to become members of labor unions or pay dues while also serving as a county’s very own “open for business” sign in a state that’s generally not.

My research has yet to turn up a single county in America that has passed its own right-to-work law in any state lacking such a statute. Maybe Kentucky could be first, for a change.

Evidence that counties passing such an ordinance stand to benefit greatly is at least as convincing as the available proof that the UK Wildcats have the No. 1 college basketball team in the country.

In research cited by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, Tennessee’s three most-populated counties bordering Kentucky – Montgomery, Robertson and Sumner counties – showed nearly 16 percent growth in private-sector employment between 2002 and 2012 in the Volunteer State, which protects workers with a right-to-work policy. Meanwhile, employment in the three most-populated Bluegrass State counties along the same Kentucky-Tennessee border – Calloway, Christian and Graves counties – grew by less than 4 percent during that entire decade.

If what’s happened in right-to-work states is any indication of what could transpire in Kentucky counties with such a policy, growth in manufacturing, incomes and population would all be significantly greater than in non-right-to-work counties while welfare rates would drop. And all this just from allowing each individual worker to say “yes” or “no” to union membership without losing their jobs.

County leaders might also find some encouragement in knowing just how popular statewide such freedoms and protections are for individual workers.

Poll after poll – including a Bluegrass Institute poll last summer showing 80 percent approval statewide for right-to-work – indicate overwhelming understanding of and support for such a policy.

Most Kentucky judge-executives and magistrates likely don’t realize that they don’t have to wait on Frankfort to do something about the economic disadvantage their counties have been placed in while too many state politicians play political patsies with our economic future.  

If enough counties were to pass their own right-to-work law, Frankfort would have no choice but to acquiesce as counties without such an advantage would be losing economic-development opportunities – not just to contiguous states, but to neighboring counties in their own state.

Kentucky law allows right-to-work policies to begin at county courthouses.

What are we waiting for?

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Jim Waters is president of the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank. Reach him at [email protected]. Read previously published columns at www.bipps.org.