RIGHT TO WORK LAWS MAYBE BACKFIRING

The new Right to Work Law in Michigan is intended to be a blow to labor and it is. The union can still negotiate with management to protect members but from a much, much weaker position. Company management can fire employees for belong to the union but will they want to do that? Will they want to fire their best employees? We in North Carolina have the same problem along with Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wyoming, and now Michigan. This law allows workers to work at the higher wage and have pension benefits won by past union action, unions to which they can refuses to pay dues. In other words they are exactly what they accuse Democrats of being. They are free loaders—the get something for nothing crowd.

Here is what it appears to me to be labors response. Unions are crating pension funds only for dues paying members. In addition, the dues paying workers can attend union supported schools over and above company-supported school that help them in doing their jobs and gives them pride in doing a better job but also makes their skills more marketable in the labor market. The unions are making the work force better in a way that allows them to do a better job then nonpaying union members—it is pitting better-trained union workers against non-union workers. The company CEO’s like this for obvious reason. The union workers should like some of this as well. CEO intended the laws to destroy unions and in that respect, it is working; union membership is down, wages are down, and political donations to Democrats are down in Right to Work states. However, if labor leaders pay their cards right, I think in the long run, it will make the union stronger, increase membership and increase wages. In a strange twist, the lazy “something for nothing crowd”, the slothful incompetent worker, the ones Republicans always complain about, can and should be fire. My hope is that these will be the nonunion workers.

In my experience, the people who need union protection the most drop out of the unions under the new law. The union should say to these people when the company fires them or they realize they do not have union pensions and want union protection, “go to hell”. Of course the union should say the same thing to members, who are lazy and not working or do not do a good job. At one time in may life, I lived in a country where there we no unions. Any persons knocking on your door looking for a job could claim to be a plumber, carpenter, electrician or what ever and there was no way to find out until after they screwed up.  In the United States, it used to be that you could ask to see their union card. If they did not have one you are taking a chance in hiring them. The Right to Work Law is backfiring because they restoring unions to their rightful place in society, painful for workers but exactly what the ones promoting the law do not want.  The final point is that workers realize there is no place in the Republican Party tent for them: it is the Republican Party that is trying to harm them.