LAS VEGAS — Democratic presidential primary candidates Saturday sought to court the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the nation’s largest public-sector trade union, by promising to do away with state right to work laws.
Nevada passed a collective bargaining law last June for its state employees giving them the right to bargain for wages, benefits, and working conditions, among other things.
Each candidate at the forum supported passing a federal law that guarantees public-sector workers the right to bargain collectively.
“The legislation that I have introduced is called the workplace democracy act. It will be, when implemented, the most sweeping labor law legislation since the 1930s,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said.
“What it will do is provide card check, so that 50% of the workers in a unit plus one when they sign their card, they will have a union. And that legislation…does away with so-called right to work legislation as part of Taft-Hartley,” he said.
Twenty-seven states have right to work laws in place, which ensure that workers cannot be forced to join a union or pay union dues as a mandate for employment.
Card Check legislation, advocated by union supporters to more easily access and organize workers by ballot, is criticized by right to work supporters who say employees can be too easily coerced into joining a union if the process is not a secret ballot.
Right to work advocates, like the National Right to Work Committee, point to the Taft-Hartley Act as evidence to this, while unions, such as the AFL-CIO say right to work laws are unnecessary and that “the real purpose of right to work laws is to tilt the balance toward big corporations and further rig the system at the expense of working families.”
“Working people’s rights are not protected in America today. I say public sector workers have that right to bargain collectively and organize,” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio told AFSME members. “But let’s do something federally that should have been done a long time ago. Let’s get rid of and ban all those state Right to Work laws. They should be made illegal.”
California Sen. Kamala Harris promised she would, “always support the right” of workers “to strike and the right to organize.”
“I will support a fifteen-dollar minimum wage … I will work against right to work laws and make sure that corporations that violate labor laws are fined,” she said.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee also pronounced that right to work laws would be gone in his administration.
“Number one, we’re going to make a congressional law to make it illegal to have Right to Work laws in the United States. Number two, we will finally pass a card check provision so when people want to have an organized unit they get organized,” he said.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock agreed, telling the AFSCME audience, “There’s been a collective attack on the right to organize” before pushing for card check legislation. “We need to do things to make it easier to bargain collectively, not make it harder.”
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has long supported a ban on right to work laws, going as far as to proposing legislation in the upper chamber back in 2017 to do so, declared, “As I see it, the unions are at the table, nobody does anything without working people being well represented.”
