PolicyGuy

Tuesday, December 27, 2005


A License to Chill.
Hand your home address over to the state to get a license plate, and you may find a union organizer on your door. That's going to change.

Today's Wall Street Journal (link for subscribers) tells of Cintas, a leading supplier of workplace uniforms. UNITE, a union, sent people to scribble down the license plates numbers of Cintas employees, and used the information to track down the home addresses of workers, who were then given a pitch for why they should join the union.

Some employees were annoyed at the tactic, and a class action lawsuit was born, alleging violation of privacy.

"According to legal documents in the case, union organizers admitted to gaining access to motor vehicle records from Pennsylvania and eight other states with the aid of a private investigator."


The union, of course, will do what it can to find new members, though the facts of the case suggest that it will pay significant penalties. Unmentioned in the article, however, is the question of why the state should be disclosing personal information that it ought to be collecting only for its own purposes.

"Justice Louis D. Brandeis'?s metaphor of the states as "laboratories" for policy experiments ... had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism. .... To this day, it continues to inhibit a truly experimental, federalist politics." -- Michael S. Greve

Home
BlogMatrix