Wisconsin’s Republican state Senate president, Scott Fitzgerald, made a big announcement Friday. As Right Wisconsin first reported, the Badger State’s legislature will meet this week in an extraordinary session and pass a right-to-work law. Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, is expected to sign it.
Right-to-work laws forbid making the payment of union dues a condition for getting or keeping one’s job. It lets each worker decide whether he wants to be part of a union. Twenty-four states already have such laws on the books. A right-to-work bill also passed Missouri’s state House earlier this month, but it will likely be vetoed by Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon.
Until recently, right-to-work was a dormant issue. Only two states adopted it in the 24 years between 1977 and 2011. But two more — Indiana and Michigan — have done so just since 2012. This is no coincidence. The movement of Midwestern states toward right-to-work comes just as they find a need to shield themselves and their employers from the aggressively pro-union policies of the Obama administration, which are aimed less at respecting workers’ rights and more at propping up a dying source of Democratic political strength.
It also comes just as unions have been exposed adopting new, desperate and heavy-handed tactics to stem membership losses and reassert their relevance in a market where labor standards and wages have passed them by. In at least three midwestern states, unions developed a scheme to skim off the top of government benefits intended for the ill and indigent, by forcing their unwilling caretakers to become dues-paying members. This boosted membership rolls and union revenues for a time in Michigan, but last year, the Supreme Court’s decision in Harris v. Quinn established that caretakers paid through states’ Medicaid programs cannot be forced to pay union dues.
Union leaders describe right-to-work laws as if they threaten workers’ rights. In fact, they restore workers’ right to choose their own representation individually. The experience in Indiana and Oklahoma demonstrates that unions can continue to exist and even gain members under these laws. The reason union leaders hate them is that they force unions to earn workers’ loyalty in a way the default, forced-dues system does not. Unions in right-to-work states actually have to keep their members happy by focusing their efforts on the bargaining process and their members’ needs, rather than spending millions to influence policy and advance a broad-spectrum Left-wing agenda that often has no connection to workers’ concerns.
In states lacking right-to-work laws, unions survive by inertia. Those hired after the initial decision to unionize (perhaps made decades earlier) never have a say in their workplace representation unless they are willing to mount and run a decertification campaign under federal law. As an analogy in political life, imagine if presidents could serve in perpetuity, without regular elections, until someone came up with the time and resources to file petitions and run a successful recall election.
The simple question of right-to-work is whether workers can be legally forced to pay tribute to supposedly voluntary associations under threat of losing their jobs. Wisconsin’s legislature will soon take up that question, and we hope they answer it the right way.
