The Right To Work For Less?

Berry Craig writes:

The Rand Paul for Senate campaign says their guy was glad to get $2,500 from the National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC) because the group “supports candidates best suited to protect Americans from labor union abuses.”

Jeff Wiggins isn’t surprised that the viciously anti-labor group is backing Paul, who wants to be Kentucky’s next Republican senator. In short, says Wiggins, president of the Paducah-based AFL-CIO Western Kentucky Area Council: It’s a case of an extremist organization supporting an extremist candidate.

Paul’s Democratic opponent in the Nov. 2 election is Jack Conway, the Bluegrass State’s attorney general. Wiggins, a United Steelworkers member, says for union members, the choice couldn’t be clearer. Rand Paul supports right to work and Jack Conway doesn’t.

Paul also opposes the Employee Free Choice Act. Conway is for the measure. The Employee Free Choice Act, supported by a bipartisan coalition in Congress, would enable working people to bargain for better benefits, wages and working conditions by restoring workers’ freedom to choose for themselves whether to join a union.

Wiggins thinks the NRTWC’s support for Paul is another opportunity for Kentucky unions to demonstrate that so-called right to work is a fraud. Kentucky does not have such laws.

A lot of people don’t understand right to work really means the right to work for less. With right to work for less, abuses come from the bosses.

Right to work for less laws aren’t designed to produce family-supporting jobs. They are geared to drive down workers’ wages and put more money in the boss’s wallet.

Paychecks in right to work states are a lot skimpier than in non-right to work states. Everywhere, union wages are higher than nonunion wages. The average paycheck of a worker in a right to work for less state is some $5,333 a year less than in other states ($35,500 compared with $30,167). Weekly wages are $72 greater in states with bargaining rights than in right to work for less states ($621 versus $549).

Under a right to work for less law, workers at a job site with a union contract can receive union-negotiated and union-won wages and benefits without joining the union or paying a service fee or dues. At the same time, unions also must represent these nonunion employees when they have trouble with the boss. These nonunion workers get a free ride.

Right to work for lss laws clearly aren’t democratic and good for workers—otherwise, why is that corporations and industry groups—not workers—cheerlead for them (and denounce the Employee Free Choice Act)? Employer organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Kentucky Association of Manufacturers are big backers of right to work for less (and staunch foes of the Employee Free Choice Act).

Right to work for less laws are legal under the Taft-Hartley Act, which an anti-union, Republican-majority Congress passed over President Harry Truman’s veto in 1947. The bill was aimed at rolling back gains unions made under Truman and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, both Democrats.

Joining right-wing Yankee Republicans in passing Taft-Hartley were conservative white Southern Democrats. They were as anti-labor as they were pro-segregation.

Not coincidentally, every former Confederate state is a right to work state. “The labor-hater and the labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth,” Dr. Martin Luther King observed.

In the end, the greed of the right to workers ends up costing them, too. Here’s why.

The more money people earn, the more money they have to spend—and will spend. The old Kentucky State AFL-CIO “Union Wages Buy More” license plates are true.

But what happens when working people can’t afford to buy consumer goods? Read some history, the subject I teach at a community college.

Employers engaged in union-busting and a race to the bottom on workers’ wages in the 1920s. The result was the Depression the 1930s, America’s worst economic crisis.

A major cause of the Depression was the weak purchasing power of U.S. workers. Many historians and economists believe the United States probably wouldn’t have experienced the Depression had business and industry owners paid workers more. Then and now, more money in workers’ hands translates into more money in store cash registers.

But Paul is only trying to hold on to a Republican seat. He is not trying to capture a Democratic one.

It would be no bad thing for the Democratic Party if his election challenged it in and from the Senate: if you want to win, then you need morally and socially conservative, economically and culturally patriotic foreign policy realists. Otherwise, people will vote for such candidates anyway. But they won't be economic populists who are Democrats for that reason. They won't be economic populists at all. They won't be Democrats at all, either. Nor will they necessarily be as conservative morally and socially as the Movement might wish, which Rand Paul is not in certain ways.

The party needs this wake-up call that it needs the Movement. And the Movement needs this wake-up call that both its party and its country need it.