Worker liberation in Michigan
We hope Republicans and Governor Rick Snyder aren’t intimidated, because they have the moral and policy high ground. Union activists want voters to believe that right-to-work laws deny union organizing rights, or ban collective bargaining. President Obama peddled this distortion on Monday in Redford, Michigan, claiming that “what we shouldn’t be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions.”
Right to work does no such thing. It empowers individual workers. As allowed under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, right to work merely lets individual workers choose for themselves if they want to join a union. The laws prevent closed union shops, which coerce individual workers to join unions and to pay union dues. A teacher who opts out under right to work, for example, could save several hundred dollars in annual union dues that go to political causes he may not even believe in.
Unions loathe right to work because they know that many workers would rather not join a union. Americans have seen what happened to the auto and steel industries, the Post Office and so many others. Unions can extract monopoly wages and benefits for a time from a profitable industry, but often at the cost of making that industry less competitive and eventually at the cost of union jobs. Thus did Teamster work rules—cake and bread had to be delivered in separate trucks—cost the bakery workers their jobs at Hostess. Right to work gives workers a choice.
Blowback
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Union definition of “right to work”: You have a right to work only after you join a union and pay them.
darwin on December 11, 2012 at 11:08 AM
…but still enjoy the benefits of union collective bargaining like higher wages and better working conditions.
lostmotherland on December 11, 2012 at 11:12 AM
Gosh I wish I had this here in WI. I pay dues, win postings only to rot in the same posting I am trying to get out of for months. O the posting I won is still waiting for me, but my stupid Union Head only cares about getting his, and that all of our dues are paid. If you aint first shift, your just a piggy bank.
/spit
watertown on December 11, 2012 at 11:13 AM
Go get a job in sweat shop!
lostmotherland on December 11, 2012 at 11:13 AM
Therefore everyone should be forced to join a union.
Right?
Bat Chain Puller on December 11, 2012 at 11:15 AM
Want to know something funny? For the company I work for, there are plants that make +$3/hr STARTING over what we make at the ceiling.
To be honest, if I was not union I would sure be compensated for my job in order to keep me where I am at. Looking at the other 5 of us on all 3 shifts us on 3rd do 2x the work with the same pay.
watertown on December 11, 2012 at 11:16 AM
You mean still enjoy the benefits of raping the taxpayer and ever growing state and local deficits.
Unions are nothing more than extortion outfits that pay no taxes anf force people to join if they want to work.
darwin on December 11, 2012 at 11:20 AM
Sure … find me one.
darwin on December 11, 2012 at 11:21 AM
Strawman alert…
Keywords- sweatshop. slavery. Koch
Bensonofben on December 11, 2012 at 11:23 AM
The Left is on the wrong side of the (real) “rights” issues of our time: the Right to Work and school choice.
visions on December 11, 2012 at 11:35 AM
For centuries, Unionism once had a prominent place in Western commerce for a good reason: strength in numbers to improve working conditions (safety, benefits, etc.). And during the previous century, many of those improvements were enshrined into law at the federal and state level (osha, work comp, wage & hour, eeoc, etc).
Nowadays, hordes of personal injury attorneys get rich suing employers for infractions and damages. As such, automation is preferred to apprenticeship; a company’s HR dept. is a defensive strategy; universities are vetting agents; and contract lawyers are built into the cost of products.
And that’s the trouble with unionism today: it’s an anachronism in search of a purpose. To a lot of the public, a union’s main function is to undermine private property rights of owners and stockholders in order to enrich themselves, even if it means the economic ruin of their employer!
(Hostess Bakeries is the latest example of that union madness).
“If union adversaries can pass a right-to-work law in the home of the once-powerful United Auto Workers, they can pretty much do it anywhere.”
I say GOOD.
locomotivebreath1901 on December 11, 2012 at 11:38 AM
According to lostmotherland’s logic, those who don’t pay any federal or state income tax (i.e. the “poor.”) should not be permitted to travel on interstate highways. They don’t pay for them, so why should they get any benefit from them?
CurtZHP on December 11, 2012 at 11:41 AM
Gasoline taxes, moron.
lostmotherland on December 11, 2012 at 11:44 AM
How was compelling employees to join a union or pay union dues ever seen as Constitutional in the first place?
petefrt on December 11, 2012 at 11:53 AM
No, the real problem is that it’s a government protected anachronism. This sort of legislation removes the government protection and allows them to compete without subsidy in the marketplace of ideas.
Which means that, if they are an anachronism, they will disappear. If they have a purpose, then they will continue to exist/prosper.
GWB on December 11, 2012 at 11:55 AM
I own a Hyundai built in Alabama in a non UAW plant. The workers there are well paid with good though not UAW benefits. If there were no UAW would those workers be paid as well as they are now? That is the reality of American unions. Their existence does raise compensation for many workers, even those who work in non union shops. If unions were outlawed in America would worker compensation rise, fall, or stay the same? In an industrial setting where skills are easily acquired I think pay would fall. I wonder how many CEOs who are responsive to their shareholders, as they should be, would invoke Henry Ford’s idea that workers should be able to afford what they produce, or would seek to lower pay as far as supply and demand would let them.
OTOH there is the idea of liberty to not join a union and not to maintain union leaders and their bureaucracies. Workers should not need to send earned monies to organizations they do not agree with in order to work. This is just a different version of the company store, which unions were organized to combat.
There are, I believe, two roads. One is to allow unions to sign contracts ONLY for those workers who associate with them and to leave the others to negotiate wages and hours individually with the employer. The other is to set the agency fee at a level where it truly represents only the union’s representation and negotiation costs. When I taught in a NYC suburb the local teacher union set the agency fee at 25% of union dues. When i went to NYC, the UFT set the agency fee at about 90% of union dues.I think the second option is more plausible while the first is more responsive to workers’ liberty to choose.
xkaydet65 on December 11, 2012 at 12:02 PM
Bloody hilarious
Schadenfreude on December 11, 2012 at 12:25 PM
You seem to imply that’s a bad thing.
GWB on December 11, 2012 at 12:32 PM
What’s that squealing noise?
CurtZHP on December 11, 2012 at 12:35 PM