Examining the racist roots and divisiveness of ‘right-to-work’ laws

LABOR RIGHTS

In 1964, Martin Luther King received the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded for his work to overturn legal segregation in the South. The struggle of King and others won passage of the Civil Rights Act guarantees equal rights in public accommodations, education and at work.

We still struggle to make those rights real. King felt that to change America’s racial inequalities and reduce poverty, we needed something more: union rights.

During the Jim Crow era, a wealthy Texas industrialist, Vance Muse, was a prime architect of so-called “right-towork” legislation. His clear purpose was to divide workers so they would have weak bargaining power, ultimately resulting in lower wages, fewer benefits and compromised working conditions.

Muse made no effort to hide the racism at the core of “right to work.” Without it, he said, “white women and white men will be forced into organizations (meaning unions) with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”

King argued long and hard to stop these laws. He called “right to work” a “false slogan” and “a dishonest twisting of words with the aim of making a vicious law sound like a good law. It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.”

In 1968, King marched with striking Memphis sanitation workers. Mayor Henry Loeb’s resistance to the simple deduction of dues from a worker’s paycheck held up the settlement of the strike for months. He knew that a union could not function without funds. Dr. King was assassinated in that struggle, but the workers finally won the right to union representation and dues checkoff. Wages went up and conditions improved. That’s what unions do.

Dues deduction simply supports worker representation. Once workers democratically vote to form a union, they may negotiate a “fair share” contractual clause that all workers either pay union dues or contribute a transparently calculated fee for the cost of contract administration and representation.

In negotiations, the employer can freely choose to accept or reject such a contractual provision. That is, unless a “right-to-work” law denies employers and employees the freedom to decide for themselves what is best for their workplace.

It is not unreasonable to have a rule that everyone who signs up to work in a unionized workplace must pay union dues or a representation fee. No worker is required to join a union, but if workers agree and the employer also agrees, every worker contributes something to the cost of representation.

New Hampshire employers with existing unions and fair share contractual clauses have implored the Legislature not to interfere with their labor relations. Does New Hampshire really want to succumb to out-of-state pressure to pass an intrusive law aimed solely at unionized New Hampshire workplaces?

Someone who does not want to join a union does not have to do so. But it is not right for someone to benefit when other workers pay union dues in order to improve conditions without contributing something to the cost of securing advancement for all workers.

Michael Honey is author of “To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice” and Haley Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma. Gail Kinney is the Worker Justice Minister at the Meriden (NH) Congregational Church/United Church of Christ.