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.
In: 96
“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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