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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Hi, former union liaison in a right-to-work state here! (not really a ‘rep’, not really relevant except for the terminology)
Some of the answers so far are partially correct but a little too specific, because the laws are not all the same and they do not impact all unions in the same way.
My union is one of the performing arts unions. Things that make us a little different:
– We are national unions where there is no local governance (besides volunteers like me who did a lot of temperature-taking and consensus-gathering but had very little power to change anything)
– The bulk of our union’s work is in New York City and Los Angeles and Chicago, so anybody outside of those places is a lower priority just because the staff and elected officials naturally are concerned with where the bulk of their money is coming in — although this has changed over the last 10 years or so and it’s more spread out than it used to be
How RTW affects us:
If you take a union contract in New York or California, you **must** join the union (note that this is a little different between the entertainment unions — in others you can take certain types of jobs a couple of times before this requirement kicks in, but in ours, it’s immediate). That means that, whether or not you want to join the union, if the job you get is under a union contract, you are paying initiation ($1800), annual dues ($176) and 2.5% of your gross earnings.
Obviously, you’re also benefiting from the union contract, which entitles you to all kinds of things, higher pay than non-union jobs, and dozens of pages of stuff about how things have to work that range from personal safety to whether or not you have to have a hotel room with a microwave. So, you get a lot of cool stuff! But what you don’t get is a choice.
This is important because **once you join the union, you cannot work a non-union job**. This is where right-to-work is not a euphemism, it is not propaganda, it is describing a (state-level) right to take whatever job you want to take and prioritizing that right over the collective bargaining rights of the union. I’ve been a union member for almost 20 years, but I don’t take a position on whether or not this is automatically a good thing.
Because I’m in a right-to-work state, technically this means that, as a union member, I can work non-union jobs … except that I’ll lose my union status and become a “dues-paying non-member” and have to pay initiation again if I ever **need** to join the union. In Texas, you don’t actually ever need to. I can take union contracts for the rest of my life without actually joining the union. I can’t vote in union elections or run for office, but I get all the benefits from the contract: pay, safety, health care, retirement. Those things are **contractual** and stem from the contract you sign, not from whether or not you happen to have membership in the corporation (union) that wrote the contract. The contract is between me and the entity hiring me.
Unions hate this because they lose one of their biggest sources of leverage, which is control of the labor market. In non-RTW states, they don’t have to persuade me that xyz is good or bad and that I should support it or not. They can just count on my “support” because I’m going to be paying dues and only taking their contracts no matter what I happen to think about it. For some people, this is bad. For most, they may not care.
Personally, while I like my union enough to have volunteered for them for five years and I support unionization in our sector in general, the behavior of most unions like mine is similar to the behavior of a monopolistic corporation. There are rarely multiple unions overlapping in the same labor market. They don’t want to compete with each other and they don’t want to have to sell you on anything. They want to count on your dues and your support. They **will** listen to what you have to say — there is real democracy going on a lot of the time! — but ultimately it’s unlikely to matter much unless you run for office and play high-level politics.
If I were independently wealthy, I would lobby to update the laws governing unions (which date from the 30s-60s) and establish a new union. The one I’m in is highly centralized and doesn’t adapt well to changing markets. In 2023, even before COVID, there were very few markets that weren’t changing, and unions have some sclerotic incentives because they will rarely consider giving up a perk they got 20 years ago even if the value is primarily enjoyed by a small number of members.
Unions are corporations and if they want your loyalty, they should be offering you something that appeals to you and making the case that it’s worth your dues and your agreement not to work below the standards they set. We don’t like it when private, for-profit companies have a monopoly on anything, because people respond to incentives and if there’s no competition, even well-intentioned union governance and staff can take their membership for granted.
OTOH — as we’re seeing right now with SAG/AFTRA and the writer’s guild — it’s essential that the labor force advocate for itself and sometimes that conflict is natural and necessary. Sometimes your personal interests have to take a back seat. One size doesn’t fit all but right-to-work has its place and I’m grateful both to be part of a union and to be in a right-to-work state.
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