The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes notes that organized labor, despite having spent something like $400 million to elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, is not seeking what was once its number one goal, repeal of Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act which allows states to pass right-to-work laws. Those laws bar unions and businesses from requiring that employees join a union. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 by a Republican Congress over President Harry Truman’s veto, was the first attempt to limit the power and spread of labor unions and has proved to be successful and enduring legislation. Union membership had risen sharply under the Wagner Act, passed in 1935; it increased somewhat in the decade after passage of the Taft-Hartley Act but in the past half-century union membership has grown only in public sector jobs, to the point that unions today represent 7% of private sector employees and about 40% of public sector employees.
Currently 22 states have right to work laws, including every Southern state except West Virginia, plus several states in the Great Plains and Mountain West. Twelve of these states passed such laws in the 1940s, six more followed in the 1950s, one in the 1960s, one in the 1970s and one in the 1980s, according to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (though it references Texas’s 1993 update of its right to work law rather than the original 1947 law). The most recent such law was passed in Oklahoma by a 54%-46% margin in a referendum in September 2001.
Repeal of Section 14(b) was the first item on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda in 1965 to be defeated in Congress. Union leaders had some reason to believe that right to work laws were unpopular; Republicans running for governor on right to work platforms had been soundly defeated in Ohio and California in 1958. But Democratic senators from right to work states, like George McGovern of South Dakota, refused to support repeal, undoubtedly because many voters believed it would hurt their states’ economies. Those fears seem to have been borne out by events. Since the 1960s right to work states have had greater economic growth and greater economic growth than non-right to work states. A convenient metric is the number of electoral votes of the right to work states in each presidential election starting in 1948, which shows that in the six decades since the proportion of electoral votes and population in right to work states has almost doubled.
Election Right to work states electoral votes
No %
1948 117 22
1952 122 23
1956 149 28
1960 156 29
1964 162 30
1968 162 30
1972 163 30
1976 173 32
1980 173 32
1984 183 34
1988 187 35
1992 195 36
1996 195 36
2000 195 36
2004 211 39
2008 211 39
2012* 220 41
*Assuming the reapportionment as projected by Polidata
