The Orange haired prince and his loyal political servants managed to temporarily mobilize the working class by tapping in to their totally appropriate hatred for the business class and the supremely wealthy. Rallying around promises to bring jobs back to the United States through trade tariffs, the prince’s rhetoric was music to the ears of folks who in particular had seen their manufacturing jobs outsourced overseas. I mean, initially, it sounds good to me too.
Trump fired up the working class with comments such as: “It’s likely if we can improve the job picture for working-class young adults, they’d have family lives that are more stable”. Trumps campaign website even complains that hourly earnings are lower than they were in the 70’s…so with a little more than 10 days before he officially clocks in, how is the tidal wave that promised to “drain the swamp” starting to look for workers? Let’s check in with Kentucky to see!
While a bunch of us were watching the wildcard games this weekend the Kentucky Senate passed a few little bills through the House as the first little symptom that they’d gone and Bill Cosby’ed your drink. HB1 pass the Senate with a 25-12 vote effectively making Kentucky a “right-to-work” state. BFD right? Indeed it is a BFD, but why? Let us take a moment to examine what “right-to-work” actually is, and where it came from.
The right-to-work movement emerged in the South in the 1940s, with Arkansas passing the first law in 1944. The name may have emerged as a conservative rejoinder to workers’ claims for a “right to strike” or as an expression of “the right of contract.” In any case, it was deeply misleading, since it had nothing to do with the right to employment.
"Although advocates sell right-to-work laws as promoting jobs and economic growth, the movement has always been ideological", said Colorado State University professor Raymond Hogler in his new book. He explains that the debate over right to work reflects a division of views—largely rooted in the existence of slavery in the South—about basic notions of community, liberty, freedom and property. The political culture of the South emphasized liberty as emancipation of the individual (except, of course, for black slaves) within a strongly hierarchical system, while the culture of the North valued freedom as a self realization of individuals by means of collective action, rooted in communities. “The South doesn’t like unions or collective activity, anything that interferes with the hierarchical world view,” Hogler writes.
After sweeping most of the South and Great Plains states from the late 1940s through the 1970s, the right-to-work movement slowed down until 2012, when it scored victories in two industrial heartland states. After saying he wasn’t interested in passing right to work, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels suddenly signed it into law. Then Michigan labor unions were caught off guard when Gov. Rick Snyder suddenly went back on his word and did the same. Those precedents, combined with many states turning red in the 2012 elections, opened the floodgates for the new multi-state push. But still, WTF does right-to-work even mean…we’ll get there.
I remember when I was 16 I got a job as a bag boy at King Soopers in Colorado Springs. King Soopers workers belong to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), at which upon signing my employment agreement, I did as well. At 16 I had no god damn idea what a union was or did, except that it took $15 from my paycheck ever damn week. I had no choice, either I agreed to be in the union and pay dues, or I agreed not to work for King Soopers…well weed wasn’t going to buy itself, and at 16 I was marginally qualified to sleep, video game, and masturbate (usually in that order)…so I couldn’t be picky, I took the job. At the time I had no idea the function of a union except sometimes I’d hear about people striking, and all the time they took money out of my paycheck. It wasn’t until a decade and a half later that began to understand why the UFCW needed my $15/ week, and what the potential benefits of compulsory union membership looked like.
Now that Kentucky is a “right-to-work” state, there will be no sleeping/video gaming/ masturbating 16 year old forced into a union; instead they’ll be quite nicely asked if they’d like to be a part of the union, and whether or not they’d like to donate a bit of their weed money to the cause…again, whats the BFD? I’ll tell you.
The problem is that when “fair share” dues requirements are eliminated through right-to-work laws or measures that focus on cutting public workers’ rights, unions often quickly lose members, money and the power to save themselves and protect remaining members. After Wisconsin approved Walker’s Act 10, for example, the union share of the public workforce dropped from 50 percent to 37 percent in the first year (a decline of about 50,000 members). By the end of the second year, public union losses ranged from about 30 percent of teachers to 88 percent of security employees. In just over a year, under Michigan’s right-to-work law, which affected only workers under new and renegotiated contracts, union membership had dropped by 7.5 percent, or 48,000 members.
It’s kind of like giving the union cancer. Eliminating the dues requirements, and/or compulsory membership, while allowing everyone to reap the benefit of the union work completely thins the resources of the union, and thereby destroys its ability to represent the worker in any sort of meaningful way. Kind of like all your dick head friends showing up to your party but not bringing any booze, then they all point to you when the cops come…to far? At any rate right-to-work laws have definite effects. A 1987 study of 21 right-to-work states found that the passage of such laws reduced union membership—by 5 to 10 percent in the first five years. As a result, the wealth of corporate shareholders grows—by 2 to 4 percent, according to one study. Apparently, this comes out of workers’ pockets: An Economic Policy Institute study found that in right-to-work states, average wages were about 3.2 percent lower (or $1,500 a year) than in other states, remember when Trump complained that wages were stagnated at levels not seen since the 70’s? Let the Cosby concoction soak in...
Yet no studies conclusively demonstrate that right-to-work laws create more jobs or a more vibrant economy. Surveys of both large corporations and small manufacturers about their location decisions have found that right to-work had little to no bearing—more influential factors included highway accessibility and construction costs. And although low-wage, right-to-work states had some success in luring manufacturing to the South in the mid-20th century, today such jobs are likely to head overseas from both the North and the South.
This is only the beginning, the Prince’s labor plan includes a national right-to-work plan. Just ask states like Wisconsin who’ve seen their collective bargaining abilities all but flat line in the wake of Governor Scott Walkers total dismantlement of the system through right-to-work laws.
So now, aside from effectively stripping unions of all power, this ingenious plan has a great potential to pit workers against each other. Workers trying hard to fight for rights, yet the union has no resources to support them because all of these “freeloaders” aren’t contributing their fair share…This is exactly what they want, us fighting each other of the meager crumbs keeping appropriately distracted as not to ask who the hell took the cake in the first place.