Opinion | Bad law blocks the unions workers want

With all due respect to former National Labor Relations Board chairman William B. Gould IV, his Feb. 29 Thursday Opinion essay, “This is how unions can win — and grow,” misses the mark.

Even before the recent boom in union organizing, research showed that 52 percent of nonunion workers — 60 million people — wanted a union at their workplace. This sentiment has not yet translated into significant growth in union membership because our weak labor laws allow employers to campaign against and interfere with workers forming unions. And there are no monetary penalties when employers break a law and violate workers’ rights.

Mr. Gould gives short shrift to this fundamental problem and instead lays the “principal burden” for building membership on the labor movement itself, and he names organizing investments as the solution. He is half right. Unions should absolutely seize this moment and the momentum from their recent wins and invest heavily in organizing more workers, as the United Auto Workers is doing with the nonunion auto companies and the AFL-CIO is doing with its new organizing center. But leaders such as Gould — together with President Biden and other elected officials — should also demand that companies stop their anti-union campaigns and respect their workers’ choice to organize, as leading corporations such as Microsoft and others have done. Better laws, consequences for violations of them and public pressure on offending companies could help bring union membership to millions of workers who would like it.

Lynn Rhinehart, Silver Spring

The author is former general counsel of the AFL-CIO.