Sunday Dialogue: State Laws on Unions

The Letter

To the Editor:

For the first time in more than 60 years, politicians are arguing with great fervor about “right to work” laws — state laws that bar unions and employers from requiring that workers join unions or pay union dues without joining.

Currently 22 states have right-to-work laws, and Indiana’s Legislature is now considering passing one, the first in a decade.

Beyond the hyperbole of employer and union groups are the two fundamental questions underlying right-to-work laws.

Unions ask, “Should workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreements be permitted to be ‘free riders’ and receive union protections and benefits without paying for them?” And employers ask, “Should workers be compelled to join or pay dues to organizations against their wishes?” This is nothing less than a clash between the basic free-rider and freedom of association arguments.

Right-to-work laws are found in the states with the lowest union membership (such as Texas, Alabama and South Carolina), but it is not clear whether membership is low because there are right-to-work laws and unions are discouraged from organizing, or if there are right-to-work laws because membership is initially low and thus unions lack political clout in these states.

Unions argue that right-to-work laws mean less revenues in the form of members’ dues. If it costs them about $1,500 to organize each new member, unions can’t see any return on their organizing investment in right-to-work law states.

But employers claim that without right-to-work laws, unions would organize more members, and as wages increase, jobs would be lost.

It will not be surprising, as the Republican primaries move to South Carolina and Florida, to hear the candidates energetically promote more right-to-work laws and even a national right-to-work law.

GARY CHAISON
Worcester, Mass., Jan. 17, 2012

The writer is a professor of industrial relations at the Graduate School of Management, Clark University.

Readers React

The fundamental question about “right to work” laws is whether or not we want to continue the downward plunge in the quality of life for middle-class Americans that has accompanied the de-unionization of the American work force.

Take a close look at who has been getting what since about the mid-1950s. That’s roughly when the anti-worker laws adopted in the late 1940s — and the tightly woven web of arcane anti-labor court and regulatory agency decisions that flow from those laws — began to bite.

In the early 1950s more than a third of American workers in private industry belonged to unions. Today it’s less than 7 percent and dropping. During that same period, real income for American workers adjusted for inflation has been declining, the number of workers without medical insurance and without pensions has been increasing, and the gap in income and wealth between the rich and everyone else in America has been exponentially increasing. In short, the American Dream has been evaporating.

Want to see the Dream disappear altogether? Pass more “right to work” laws. States with such laws tend to have lower household income, more workers without medical insurance and pensions, higher rates of workplace death and the lowest educational levels.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got it exactly right: “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.”

JACK JOYCE
Swans Island, Me., Jan. 18, 2012

The writer was president of the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers from 1979 to 1999.

I was a dues-paying member of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers for 38 years before retiring in 2007. I have seen firsthand how those teachers who chose not to become union members and pay dues benefited from the collective bargaining agreements that our union members had to make numerous sacrifices for, like going out on strike, being jailed and being beaten up on picket lines.