This could get ugly. Even though he has the legal right to do so the union thugs will probably want to make an example of him. I hope he wins but he will probably face a lot of harassment.

Good for him.

Ayn Rand said that labor unions are the only decent group today (1972) and hold the greatest potential for saving our society from economic collapse. She suggested that any business that offers unsafe working conditions should be punished under law, whether or not any actual injury occurs.

In 1972, Edwin Newman interviewed Ayn Rand for his show “Speaking Freely” on NBC-TV. Among other statements, Ayn Rand said: “I am not an enemy of labor unions. Quite the contrary. I think that they are the only decent group today, ideologically. I think they are the ones who will save this country, and save capitalism, if anybody can.” She went on to say: “But the one flaw is that labor unions are government-enforced and become a monopoly and can demand higher wages than the market can offer. This union power creates the unemployable. It creates this vast group of people, the unskilled laborers who have no place to go for work. The artificial boosting of the skilled laborer’s income causes unemployment on the lower rungs of society. Every welfare measure works that way. It doesn’t affect the so-called rich, if that the humanitarians are worried about it, always affects the poor.”

A few minutes earlier, on the same show, speaking of the proper role of government, she said:
“But on the matter of protecting people from physical danger, if certain conditions of employment, let us say, are unsafe and it can be proved that there is a physical risk – I don’t say that we have to wait until somebody dies – then the employer who is creating this risk can be sued, and can be severely punished financially. In other words, there can be a law protecting a man from physical injury by another man. In this case, the employer who puts men into conditions of danger – not accidentally, but intentionally or carelessly – can be penalized because he is infringing the right of his workers not to be injured physically.”

The entire interview and many others are collected in the anthology Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed, edited by Marlene Podritske and Peter Schwartz (Lexington Books, 2009).

More here: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2013/...

In _Atlas Shrugged_ is a scene where Hank Rearden is walking across the yards with the steward of the Rearden union. The union man says that it is not him against Hank Rearden, but he and Hank Rearden against Fred Kinnan and Oren Boyle.

The UAW has a long history of problems; so does General Motors. GM and Chrysler took the bailout; Ford did not need it. I have worked on contracts at all three. I also had Toyota as a customer when I was employed by Kawasaki. Later, I worked a contract for Honda. If you want to discuss how corporate culture defines the work rules that make or prevent profit, we can do that.

Just being "anti-union" is not advocating for capitalism. Unions serve a purpose.

One generalization I will offer is that the farther you are from Detroit, the more rational are the working conditions. At Ford in Detroit, some supervisors acted like the production police. Dressed in blue-on-blue with their radios clipped to their collars, they prowled the floors looking for violations. In Minneapolis, I worked with a union guy who had a BS in mechanical engineering. He liked working with his hands; and they gave him all the responsibility he asked for.

The UAW got theirs when the car manufacturers moved to the Southern states
The UAW needs to tour the remains of Detroit before they make any demands

Free rider. He does not reject the wages or the working conditions. He is just someone who happens to be some kind of patriotic conservative. You get that in Dearborn. The Democratic Party Congressional representatives all support 2nd Amendment "gun rights" (guns don't have rights; people do) because everyone goes deer hunting two weeks a year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kb9yhhfl...

Do not confuse these range-of-the moment pragmatists with actual advocates of reality and reason.