I’m not in a RTW state and people in my state have been arguing about it as long as I can remember. Even after I read it, I still don’t understand what it means and how it could bring wages down.
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“Right to work” is a rule in some states that lets people work in union companies without being in the union or paying money to it. It is highly contentious with these arguments commonly stated:
Supporters say:
1. Workers can choose if they want to join the union or not.
2. It might bring more jobs to the state.
Detractors say:
1. Unions may lose power to get better pay and benefits for workers.
2. Some workers might get benefits from the union without paying for it, which isn’t fair.
Rtw is a policy where people in certain industries are allowed to work outside of a union. Unions are important for guaranteeing certain standards of employment, such as wages, benefits, and other protections. They can only secure these things by having enough members to leverage labor against employers. RTW severely weakens unions, which in turn strengthens the ability for employers to dictate terms of employment. In general, employers will spend as little as possible on anything, including employees and our wages.
That depends on where you are.
Internationally, the [right to work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_work) is a human rights framework which says that everyone has an inherent right to have a job. Some version of the language below (from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) might be put into the local nation’s Constitution:
>Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
A nation that recognizes a human right to work might pass laws and social programs to protect that right, such as laws mandating safe and healthy working conditions, or a social agency that will find you a job if you voluntarily choose to use their services when you are unable to find one yourself.
In the United States, however, “[right-to-work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law)” is mostly a confusing misnomer. It doesn’t mean the same as what the term means internationally… in fact, it doesn’t even mean what you might assume it means, just by looking at the dictionary definition of the words “right” and “work”.
In the United States, “right-to-work” laws are laws that prohibit unions and companies from requiring non-union members to contribute to the cost of union representation. “U.S. right-to-work laws do not aim to provide a general guarantee of employment to people seeking work”, as Wiki says; instead, they guarantee that an employee can avoid paying for labor union benefits, even if they cannot be prevented from using workplace practices, protections, and norms that the labor union fought for.
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It’s a euphemistic term referring to banning unions from requiring membership (which requires union dues) as a condition of employment. It allows people to benefit from union activity without actually funding said activity, thereby intentionally creating a [free-rider problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem) that makes unions be less financially stable, represent fewer workers, and therefore overall be less effective at advocating for employees. The ultimate goal of right-to-work laws is the destruction of unions.
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Since all the answers here have given you the anti-RTW stance on this, I’ll try to balance this out. RTW laws do weaken unions. As a result, RTW is one of a number of items like tax incentives or land discounts that states can use to lure a company to their state.
States that can draw in companies this way could bring in a lot of jobs. A lot of available open jobs will tighten the labor market, causing employers to have to improve wages to attract workers, which can somewhat offset the loss of union bargaining for wages.
It isn’t a silver bullet and a lot of states now have RTW laws, which sort of weakens its uniqueness. It also doesn’t work as often as the people support RTW would tell you it does.
Another common reason given for RTW by supporters is that by not requiring individuals to pay dues, no worker will be forced to contribute to an organization that might be supporting political causes they disagree with. I tend to think the concern about this is overblown, but it is red meat to anyone who’s politics are anti-union.
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When a company’s workers unionize, they bargain collectively with the company they work for. Typically, one of the first things they get the company to agree to is not to employ workers who don’t work for the union. This makes the union very powerful in all the rest of the negotiations.
The “right to work” is the right of non-union workers to get a job at a union company – in other words, it makes that agreement illegal, so companies can always hire non-union people.
This weakens labor unions and makes companies stronger, which makes wages and benefits to workers go down.
Some people blame unions for making struggling companies less able to complete by lowering wages, and argue that it’s better for workers to have jobs that pay less money than for such companies to go out of business and lay everyone off.
“Right to work” is one of those elements of unionized labour that shows there’s never such a thing as an ideal solution where people are involved.
It used to be that the employer had all the power, and he knew it. He could hire you to work for one rate in the morning and when you line up at the end of your shift to collect your pay, he gives you something less than what he promised and says, “If you can’t live with it, don’t come back tomorrow.”
And the worker would have absolutely zero recourse.
So the union steps in and says, “That’s bullshit. That can’t continue.” And the union is right, but now we have a conflict and the union has no teeth. So the union starts to grow teeth. The employer can’t make money from his office if his workers refuse to work. That alone is a powerful motivator to bargain in good faith and treat his workforce fairly, but nobody actually responds that way.
Nobody says, “Yep, you got me, you win, I’ll be good.” They were assholes for a reason, and it doesn’t go away because they lost a fight. They’re going to look for new ways to be assholes because being an asshole is far more profitable than being a good guy.
So the employer starts hiring new workers to replace the union workers. This actually led to bloodshed on a lot of occasions. “Scab” workers showing up to work and facing a wall of union workers with pickets. If you’re curious, Google the phrase, “cross the picket line.” It’s not a collection of shining moments in labour history. If the non-union worker is allowed to go to work, the union loses all of its teeth. It no longer has the combined value of the workforce behind its negotiations, because the employer just made those union workers obsolete.
That makes union workers very angry, and violence is not at all uncommon in those kinds of situations.
And frankly, it’s a union overreach. The union effectively takes over the business with their own set of rules. It’s not always better for the worker to be union. But it’s not right to say, “You have to be a part of our union in order to get a job here.” It’s trading one form of required compliance for another.
The problem is, there’s no ideal solution. There’s no “best” for every situation. There are times when a union can be a tremendous asset to a workforce, and times when it’s nothing but a liability. Assuming unionization is always best is naive. So sometimes people try to correct that by saying the union can’t become as bad as the employer. The union is supposed to support the worker, not the other way around. And that’s where you get, “right to work” laws. “The union has no right to prevent me, a non-union individual, from applying for and being given a job that I’m qualified for” is a pretty compelling statement.
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