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 states make it illegal for union membership (and therefore the confiscation of union dues from your paycheck) to be a condition of employment. This undermines the financial resources of unions, as most people will simply pocket their dues than give them to a union in hopes that it will pay off for them in the long run.
These laws are already very marginal, since only about 6% of American private sector workers belong to unions, and union rolls have been plummeting for decades. Ultimately, automation, free trade, and competition are what put paid to unions, and the ‘right to work’ laws are merely evidence of their political prostration.
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.
On a stable economy, there is a bit of inflation, which for the average person and company, is simply the loss of purchase power with the same amount of nominal money. If the income is not increased, then the worker/company is able to buy less than he/she was able to in the past months/years.
Enter the union. A single worker is rarely able to convince employer to get a raise just because things are more expensive. The union, with the threat of a strike, can make it more expensive to the employer to have a strike than to simply correct the salaries for the inflation. It’s simple math: a 5-day working week have 260 working days for year at best ; paying a 2% raise is far more worthy and less trouble than a strike dropping productivity of a week to zero.
Companies dislike this dynamic because if they aren’t able to pass down the prices to the consumers, they are the ones who absorb the loss of the inflation and can have reduced profits or even operate on a loss. So companies ask for legislators for a change of legislation.
Legislators make new legislation that makes it so that workers are not forced to pay for the costs of the union, yet can still reap the benefits of union membership. Most of workers won’t pay the union fees simply because people don’t like paying fees if they can. The union now starts seeking help from other politicians, and this new dynamic means that even people who might think it’s acceptable to pay the fees might have different ideas from the politicians who are in close contact with the unions and also refuse to pay the fees.
As a result of this, union membership numbers plummet and the union loses negotiating power. Because of this loss, the union is barely able to do anything worthy for its members, and workers’ trust in the unions decrease.
As unions collapse or hold minimum power, wages are kept the same despite inflation over the years and this leads to more people struggling financially. The ones who are poor enter a category of despite being employed, requiring welfare programs. The ones who are middle class enter a situation where they are unable to afford a mortgage for a house or to acquire assets.
As a result of this struggling and inability to buy assets, middle class couples become financially unable to have children and fertility rate plummets to a level below maintenance. This would create a labor shortage and the corresponding increase of wages as merely a result of supply and demand mechanisms. As years pass, new companies are formed and they have another viewpoint. By promoting diversity in public policies and as company policies, they are able to hire immigrants across all levels of education and qualification, by paying a much lower wage than they would need to if the labor shortage actually happened.
**TL;DR**: Company asks for right to work laws to make unions weak, wages are kept same despite inflation, fertility rate drops, decades pass and the threat of labor shortage is real, companies avoid it by asking for immigration laws to change and to successfully hire immigrants in order to keep paying workers a much lower wage.
One of the issues with “right to work” is that unions DEMAND dues from it’s members and the unions don’t always provide enough value to be worth those dues. Sometimes these union bosses simply takes the dues, extort money from a company and grow their influence unchecked.
So let’s start off with a brief lesson about unions and collective bargaining.
Joey is running a Lemonade Stand, selling glasses of lemonade for $1 each that cost him 50 cents each. His business is doing so well that he wants to expand and bring some people on to help him run his lemonade stands. So he hires some of the other local children and offers to pay them 5 cents per glass of lemonade they sell. Things go on like this for a little bit, and his five workers realize that they’re doing all the work while he sits at home playing videogames, and he’s making 45 cents per cup and they’re only making 5 cents a cup. So they get together and come and talk to Joey, and say hey, we don’t think this is far. We’re happy to run your lemonade stands for you, but we deserve a bigger cut of the profits. Pay us 30 cents per cup or we’ll all stop working for you. Joey balks, so they stop working (aka a strike) for him for a few days and he starts not making any money as he’s not selling any lemonade. Joey realizes getting 20 cents per cup they sell is better than nothing, so he agrees and they come back to work.
His five workers then decide that this probably won’t be the only time Joey’s going to try to take advantage of them, so they form a union, and agree that 5 cents of the 30 from each cup they sell will go into a collective pool, and this money will be used in support of their union efforts. For instance, in the event of another strike, they can all dip into this money to cover expenses for the period they won’t be getting paid for.
Joey, of course, decides that he’s definitely interested in taking advantage of them, so he starts to bring in other workers. He tells these workers they can get 30 cents per cup sold, OR they can get 25 cents per cup sold because 5 cents has to go towards the union – and who needs that union when you’re getting 30 cents per cup? The new workers, having not seen what the union had to go through to get their 30 cents per cup, choose not to contribute towards it. Eventually, he has enough non-union employees on the payroll that when the unionized members come forward with another demand, like “hey, we should get a bathroom break while we’re working, and we should have access to cool water to drink since we’re out here in the hot sun”, Joey tells them to pound sand. They threaten a strike again, but the non-union workers don’t want to lose their money and there isn’t enough in their fund to cover everyone, since only five of them have been paying into it. So even with all five of them gone, the remaining 10 workers are enough to keep things rolling without them. So their collective bargaining power has been destroyed. Joey is now free to squeeze the remaining employees where he can, and the next few people he brings on he’s only paying 25 cents per cup to. He raises prices a little but doesn’t raise what he’s paying his workers. Small perks start vanishing. Eventually, he ends up in a position much like he was in before the union formed.
Now let’s say that as part of the initial union deal, the union also negotiated a rule: anyone new hired HAD to participate in the union. They have to pay their 5 cents, and they have to abide by what the union says when it coms to strikes. Now, Joey doesn’t have that leverage to break up the union over time by bringing on non-unionized workers to replace them.
So Joey goes whining to the PTA and has them make a rule against this. It’s so unfair, he says, that this union gets to claim 5 cents of all of his workers’ money. The workers should be able to choose whether or not to join the union and pay the dues. They have a Right to Work, the evil corrupt union can’t take that away from them with its unfair rule that won’t let them work unless they’re a member of the union! The PTA decides he’s right and intervenes, the union’s deal is nullified, and we’re back to the situation where Joey can break up their collective bargaining power by diluting how many workers are members of the union.
Should be noted that in Germany we have strong unions and “right to work” – or rather just the constitutional principle that everyone has the right to join or not to join unions and associations. It’s a constitutional freedom that doesn’t need to be a bad thing. It’s only a bad thing when people are stupid and short-sighted (not knowing that joining a union is best for them in the mediumterm).
As some have stated, “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:
But more than that, “Right to work” is a troll by fascist/capitalist forces who wanted to destroy labor unions because it cuts into their profits and their ability to rule the State/country without interference from people who work for a living.
It’s a lie, a phrase chosen to trick people into thinking they have a “right to work”. Just like “pro-life” is a troll phrase to mask the better descriptor of “anti-choice”. If a state actually had a “right to work”, then every citizen would have a guaranteed job, wouldn’t they? But they don’t, least of all in a gop held State.
“Right to work” was chosen because it pits workers against workers, as the anti-democratic forces watch and laugh and snicker to themselves “wow I can’t believe that worked”.
it’s a backwards gop-led initiative to gut union power. in reality it’s the right to work for less because your union’s have all been eviscerated
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