I believe that everyone is entitled to equal rights, regardless of which side of the money-for-labor transaction they are on. This Texas law would deprive some people of their rights while granting extra benefits to others. That is unjust and violative of the equal rights of free men.
This sounds good until you realize that it applies to the current situation as well.
Currently employers are allowed to deprive some people (employees) of their rights while leaving other's benefits (non-employees) alone. They can't restrict non-employees from carrying in their parking lots because they can't fire them and they can't prosecute them. But they can fire employees. In other words, if your argument is valid as it applies to the potential law then it is equally valid when applied to the current situation.
Therefore the current situation is also unjust and violative of the equal rights of free men. So which is worse, the company telling me what I can and can't do in my property (my car is an extension of my home per TX law), or the government telling the company that the legal items in my car are none of their business.
The issue isn't whether your vehicle and its contents are your property -- nobody would argue with that, and our laws currently protect it as such.
The issue here is whether a private employer employer can fire you if you have a gun in your car in violation of company policy, or if you refuse to give consent for a voluntary search of your vehicle for guns.
The way I see it, an employer has every right to do these things. I agree that it is a stupid policy, but it is one that an employer is well within his rights to make.
Again, this sounds good until we realize that the REASON you say that an employer has the right to do these things is because of his property rights.
If property rights are that powerful then they don't suddenly become invalid when they're employee property rights instead of employer property rights.
Again, it comes down to balancing things, not a black & white situation. Which is a worse violation of property rights? Telling a company that they can't control the legal contents of privately owned vehicles in their public parking lots or telling a person that he can't control the legal contents of his own private property?
By the way, the former obviously isn't too odious given that companies are already unable to control the contents of non-employee's cars in their parking lots.
Besides, it's not REALLY about property rights, that's just how it's been couched to try to obfuscate the situation. It really about what an employer can and can't force an employee to do as part of an employment contract.
And how does it violate any of your natural rights for someone to make such policies when you can freely choose not to accept their terms and not sell your labor to them?
This argument works only if you consider labor to be a commodity like a lemon or a gallon of gas. Two people meet, seconds later the transaction happens, the buyer is happy, the seller is happy, another few seconds later they go their merry way.
The problem is that not all jobs are as common or as interchangeable as one gallon of gas is to another or one lemon is to another. And a person doesn't invest decades of his life in the gallon of gas he sells. Nor does a lemon buyer enter into an ongoing relationship with the lemon seller.
So let's look at how reality can work.
I spend most of a decade getting an expensive and specialized education. I then sign on with a company that happens to be in a gun friendly state and that happens to have gun friendly policies. I spend another 2+ decades developing a specialized skill set that the company needs but that isn't quite as easy to find buyers for outside the company as a gallon of gas might be. Somewhere along the way, the company decides that their liability concerns outweigh my concerns for my safety and change their policies to prevent me from having a gun in my car AND to prevent me from parking off campus.
It's all well and good to say that I could "freely choose not to accept their terms and not sell my labor to them" but I think it's pretty clear to all of us that a rational person in that position and in the current economy/job market is obviously not going to make a decision like that. The companies know that. They formed those policies knowing that most employees couldn't afford to give up employment. The company doesn't want to run off the employees who carry guns for self-defense. They just want to control the contents of privately-owned employee vehicles.
The bottom line is that this, like all gun control, is about control. The company wants to extend their control into other people's property and business. They want to invalidate the property rights of others in the name of property rights. In the name of controlling what happens on company property they control what is stored in other people's property and not just on company property but also while traveling to and from company property. They want to decrease their own liability at the expense of increasing the liability of others.
It is the nature of people and organizations to continue trying to expand their power and the area that they control unless they are forced to stop. It's time for these companies to stop expanding their area of control and to draw back a little. What they're trying to control isn't any of their business and should never have been any of their business in the first place.