Republicans' promotion of 'right-to-work' laws, designed to undermine basic union functions, is pure ideological vendetta
This week, the Indiana House voted to make the state "right to work". The bill is expected to easily pass the Republican-controlled Senate and Governor Mitch Daniels, whose first act as a governor was to strip state employees of collective bargaining rights, will sign it into law. It's not yet clear how soon that will occur; currently, it looks like Indiana Republicans want to have it signed before the Super Bowl on 5 February (the NFL Players' Association has been a vocal opponent of the bill).
Right-to-work (RTW) laws are nothing new – Indiana would be the 23rd state to have one. But it is notable that this has happened now in a midwestern state, since RTW laws were previously a mostly southern and Rocky Mountain state phenomenon, which are mostly non-union anyway. But there are a number of myths about what RTW laws are and do.
First, let's be clear about what Indiana's Right to Work bill does not do. It does not end "compulsory union membership", or the "closed shop"; there is no such thing. Contrary to the deliberately misleading rhetoric of RTW laws' corporate sponsors (pdf), this is already illegal, and has been since 1947. Nowhere in the country can you be fired, demoted or hauled off to the gulag for refusing to join a union, right-to-work state or not.
Nor does it suddenly make it possible to refuse to pay union dues. Workers who object to how their unions spend their dues money outside of the workplace – such as on political contributions – can already choose not to pay that portion of their dues (again, right-to-work or not). In no case can a worker who is Republican be forced to support a Democratic candidate through their union dues.
Rather, right-to-work legislation, such as the bill Indiana will soon enact into law, prohibits a business from entering into a type of private agreement with its employees, under which they can be obliged to contribute to a specific fund. Sometimes called "agency fees", "representation fees" or "fair share provisions", these cover only what unions spend to represent workers who are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. These are local deals involving, for example, the negotiation of contracts, the filing of grievances and the defence of employees in disputes with their managers.
Under what are called "duties of fair representation", unions are legally required to provide those services to all workers covered by a contract, whether they are members of the union or not. The only difference, then, is that under right-to-work laws, workers may choose not to pay for those benefits which they will continue to receive anyway: health insurance, vacations or simply established work rules such that they cannot lose their job for capricious reasons, such as being falsely accused of stealing staplers or the boss waking up and deciding to fire everyone wearing brown shoes that day, which is perfectly legal in most – which is to say, non-union – workplaces.
In other words, right-to-work laws simply incentivize freeloading. This, of course, is something RTW laws' Republican backers tend to frown upon when it comes to welfare, but seem willing to embrace as a means of starving their political opponents. Notably, such laws do not undercut unions' political activities; workers can already choose to contribute to those or not. Instead, they only cripple a union's ability to perform the mundane, everyday functions of representing workers on the job – the very tasks Republicans say unions should be restricted to doing.
If right-to-work boosters were honest about what the laws were designed to do – which is simply to punish unions – they would still find supporters. There are, after all, plenty of politicians who hate unions for purely ideological reasons. But they are never sold that way, and Indiana is no exception. Instead, a right-to-work law will show that Indiana is "open for business", says Indiana House speaker Brian Bosma, and make the state a "magnet for job creation", promises GOP activist Grover Norquist.
Actual evidence in this regard is highly doubtful. Currently, the state with the highest unemployment in the country, Nevada, is a right-to-work state, as are six of the top ten states in jobless rates. The last state to adopt a right-to-work law, Oklahoma in 2001, has seen manufacturing jobs decline by a third since its passage.
But Bosma is not one to let economic reality get in the way of political expediency. Nor is Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who was against right-to-work before he was for it. He's pledged to sign the bill into law, but as recently as 2006 declared to the Teamsters:
"I'm a supporter of the labor laws we have in the state of Indiana and I'm not interested in changing any of them – not a prevailing wage law and certainly not a right-to-work law."
What's changed since then? Daniels says it's the recession, which hasn't really changed. He doesn't say it's his elevated national profile resulting from speculation over a presidential run, culminating in his being tapped to deliver the GOP's response to Obama's state of the union address earlier this week.
Maybe, it's a genuine change of heart. Either way, Daniels' Damascene conversion is symbolic of much broader changes within his own party. Union membership wasn't a particularly partisan issue in years past. President Nixon expanded organizing rights under his administration. Ronald Reagan was a former union president himself. As Daniels' 2006 speech shows, Republicans until recently used to make at least halfhearted attempts to reach out to some of the more conservative unions – typically, the Teamsters and Carpenters. Not any longer.
It's not that unions have moved much to the left. Rather, it's Republicans who have tacked so sharply to the right, precisely on those mundane workplace issues on which there was once a consensus: the right to organize, the right to bargain, the idea that free riders should pay their fair share. It can be seen in the assaults on union rights in neighboring Ohio and Wisconsin, and the GOP's quixotic (and self-defeating) crusade against the National Labor Relations Board – not even a union, but a nonpartisan mediating agency.
The days of the pro-labor Republican are gone, probably forever. "We cannot afford to have civil wars over issues that might divide us and divert us," a different Mitch Daniels once said. Now, Republicans believe, they can.