In 1935, Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”), to protect the rights of working people and encourage harmony for both labor and management. The NLRA is what protects private sector workers’ right to organize, collectively bargain, and be free from discrimination as a result of those actions. The NLRA is also what created the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) which serves to administer and enforce the NLRA. The NLRA gave workers the rights discussed in Part One of the Right-To-Work-For-Less series.
The Right-To-Work-For-Less movement was spawned by the 1947 Amendments to the NLRA. In 1947, Congress provided that Unions and Employers were permitted to include a union security clause in their contracts. A union security clause allows the employer and Union to require employees to become a member of the Union as a condition of employment. At the same time Congress included a provision that made the union security clause illegal in any state whose state laws prohibited such a clause.
Initially, ten states passed laws which prohibited a union security clause (Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia). By this time, Florida already had a law prohibiting a union security clause. By 1955, five more states passed laws prohibiting the union security clause (Nevada, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah). Over the next twenty years six more states passed laws of the same nature (Kansas, Wyoming, Louisiana, Idaho, Texas and Oklahoma). By 2001 roughly half of the states had right-to-work-for-less laws. The big point to take away from the list of states opting for right-to-work-for-less is that the list did not include the most populous or economically developed states.
In the time that the bulk of the states became Right-To-Work-For-Less, the majority of Americans lived in states where Unions and employers were lawfully permitted to negotiate over union security clauses. However, over a period of several decades the United States experienced a gradual but dramatic shift in both population and economic development. The Northeast, home of American manufacturing for so long, became the rust belt. The Southwest experienced a population explosion, and manufacturing was no longer the economic engine of our country. One feature of this tremendous shift was a decline in many of the industries where Unionism had been so entrenched for so long. Industries such as steel, textiles, shipbuilding, furniture manufacture, retail and publishing experienced huge declines in the face of technological changes and foreign competition.
In 2012, two states that had formerly been at the heart of manufacturing in our country, Michigan and Indiana, voted to prohibit union security clauses. These states became right-to-work-for-less after their citizens were barraged by a political campaign massively funded by big-money interests who cared not at all for the working person. The campaign was intended to make sure that corporate America would not have to contend with Unions in these two states.
The sad fact is that this campaign has nothing whatsoever to do with worker rights and everything to do with employer and corporate rights. American workers have since 1960 had the right to decline to be a member of the Union that represents them at work! That’s right; this fundamental right was firmly established by the Supreme Court in a decision that issued in 1960 guaranteeing U.S. workers the right to decline to join a Union. The individual worker still had to pay his or her share of the cost of being represented, but they were not and could not be required to join the Union!
If American workers already have the right to decline to join their Union, then what is the push behind the right-to-work-for-less movement? It’s not about giving workers more rights – this movement is about protecting employers and corporate profits.
Stay tuned for Part Three, when I’ll discuss some of the current Right-To-Work-For-Less battle grounds and explain the strategy that is used by ALEC and the National Right-To-Work-For-Less Legal Defense Fund in these states to attempt to strip rights away from working people.
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