This week, Republican Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan signed a right-to-work bill into law despite previous promises that he would not approach the issue. On April 6, 2011 Snyder told The Associated Press that right-to-work legislation was “divisive” and that “it was not on my agenda.” But on Tuesday, the governor ignored his previous call to avoid the contentious politics of right-to-work legislation and hastily signed the bill before the public was able to debate it at length.
Conservative media outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Fox News have celebrated the bill’s signing as a “pro-worker” initiative that will benefit labor by freeing it from the “coercion” of compulsory membership and dues payment that unions demand. Pointing to other Midwestern industrial states like Wisconsin, which recently passed similar legislation, the right has argued that Michigan too must now become a right-to-work state if it is to remain competitive as an incubator for job creation.
The argument is a fallacious one made not on sensible economics but rather on sly politics. Michigan is now the 24th state to adopt right-to-work legislation; the idea that employers are starved of locations without such laws is deceptive and wrong.
No, conservatives are arguing for right-to-work laws because they hasten the demise of an already anemic labor movement in America. Conservatives are pushing right-to-work laws because of organized labor’s historic ties and political commitment to the Democratic Party.
Democrats have enjoyed labor’s support ever since Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law back in 1935, which protected private sector workers in their efforts to organize into unions and collectively bargain with their employers.
According to the non-partisan independent research organization the Center for Responsive Politics, the average financial contribution from unions to Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate in 2012 was $145,063 and $85,887, respectively. Congressional Republicans in both chambers received a fraction of those sums, totaling a mere $25,383 in the House and $7,812 for the Senate.
Conservative politicians behind the push for right-to-work laws are attempting to remove unions as a source of financial power for Democrats and as an organizing force in support of progressive policies like a higher minimum wage, greater progressive taxation and fair trade agreements.
And they are winning.
Today, unions represent a mere 12 percent of the American workforce as opposed to 20 percent in 1983. In the private sector that number is even lower, with only 7 percent of workers having union representation in 2012 whereas in 1983 that number stood at 17 percent.
From the height of labor’s power during the 1950s, when over 40 percent of American workers were unionized, notably under the Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, today unions are a shadow of their former selves. Today, unions lack both the members and finances they once possessed and the political power that came with them.
Passage of a right-to-work law in Michigan — the birthplace of the United Auto Workers, where over 17.5 percent of workers are unionized — is a symbolic victory against unions as the battle for workers’ rights now comes knocking on the front door of the battered House of Labor.
The right is waging this war on workers because of organized labor’s long illustrious history in progressive politics. Unions were at the core of the organizing effort in support of FDR’s New Deal, which established programs like Social Security, national public works and a federal minimum wage.
In 1965, the AFL-CIO was instrumental in pushing Democrats to support Medicare, Medicaid and LBJ’s “War on Poverty.” During the 1960s, organized labor fought on the right side of history alongside civil rights protesters at the March on Washington for racial equality.
Showing solidarity with his union brothers and sisters in the fight for racial, economic and social justice, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as ‘right-to-work.’ It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘works.’ Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining…We demand this fraud be stopped.”
The decline of organized labor represents a grave threat to the liberal project that gave the United States the New Deal and Great Society. The decline of organized labor represents a grave threat to the liberal project in the United States.