In an article entitled The Goal Is Freedom: Labor's "Right to a Free Market" posted at the Foundation for Economic Education, Sheldon Richman notes:

Of course, the pro-business side opposes the EFCA, while the pro-labor side supports it. Both say they want to protect workers from intimidation. But looking deeper we see that the conflict is over how a government agency, the NLRB, should manage labor relations. Should libertarians be offering advice to interventionists on how to do a job that they shouldn't be doing in the first place?

Far from repeating the talking points from either side, Mr. Richman offers the following:

It should be obvious that government-managed labor organizing is no more deserving of libertarian support than government-managed trade or government-managed political campaigns. Laissez faire means that workers are free to use any tactics short of violence to press their case with employers. This would include peaceful "unauthorized" wildcat strikes, sympathy strikes, secondary boycotts, and other nonviolent activities now outlawed. Needless to say, violent interference with strike breakers would be illegitimate.

Similarly, employers would be free to use all peaceful tactics in opposing union organizing, including yellow-dog contracts and company unions (now illegal). Laissez faire would not sanction the horrors of the past: neither union violence against innocent persons and property nor police and private violence against peaceful workers.

But if violence against the innocent is illegitimate, we can't ignore the larger context in which employer-employee relations take place in America -- the cartelized liberal corporatist, or neo-mercantilist, political economy, which at its most fundamental level privileges entrenched business interests through a variety of interventions that dampen upstart competition and hence reduce the demand for labor and otherwise restrict worker options. The result is a systemic bias -- albeit not insurmountable -- against independent centers of economic activity, whether from upstart entrepreneurs, worker-owned cooperatives, or employees merely seeking better working conditions. The same principle that would eliminate the labor laws would also devour those anticompetitive interventions.

As the editor of the old Liberty magazine, individualist Benjamin Tucker, put it (emphasis added): "It is not enough, however true, to say that, 'if a man has labor to sell, he must find some one with money to buy it'; it is necessary to add the much more important truth that, if a man has labor to sell, he has a right to a free market in which to sell it, -- a market in which no one shall be prevented by restrictive laws from honestly obtaining the money to buy it. If the man with labor to sell has not this free market, then his liberty is violated and his property virtually taken from him."

MAY 1 SUPPLEMENT:   Picking up where Mr. Richman left off, Mutualist Blog notes:

[F]or any of the usual suspects tempted to pigeonhole this as a "statist unions vs. libertarian employers" morality play, that there is no libertarian dog in this fight.

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So, employers, when you're ready to eliminate statism from labor relations altogether, come back and we'll talk. But so long as you're simply proposing a form of statism that's rigged in your interest and against mine, I think I'll take my statism the other way around, thank you.