And I was thinking, just this morning, that such a bill is a good idea but would probably not happen anytime soon. Glad to be wrong!
Eight Republican Senators introduced a bill Tuesday giving workers a choice as to whether to join labor unions, which they argue will boost the nation’s economy and provide an increase in wages.
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), introduced the National Right to Work Act to “reduce workplace discrimination by protecting the free choice of individuals to form, join, or assist labor organizations, or to refrain from such activities,” according to a statement.
Seven other Republicans signed onto the effort: Sens. Tom Coburn (Okla.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), Mike Lee (Utah), Rand Paul (Ky.), James Risch (Idaho), Pat Toomey (Pa.) and David Vitter (La.).
Some good names in there. And some good reasons to support the bill.
From 2000 to 2008, about 4.7 million Americans moved from forced-union to right to work states and a recent study found that there is “a very strong and highly statistically significant relationship between right-to-work laws and economic growth,” and that from 1977 to 2007, right-to-work states experienced a 23 percent faster growth in per capita income than states with forced unionization.
Senator Cowboy Poet can be expected to bottle this up until the end of time; unions put him over the top in his close call last time around.
So when is Davis-Bacon up for repeal?
The Republicans are trying to conduct a Grand Social Experiments.
Right to work states have fallen into two categories
traditionally; conservative Southern states with a history of economic exploitation through slavery and Jim Crow, and low population, low unemployment states in the “empty quarter” that have economies based in heavily federally subsidized extractive industries and agriculture. In those Southern states, the middle class has always been relatively small (compared to states in the Northeast and Upper Midwest), and there is greater acceptance of high levels of poverty and income inequality. I think this economic history makes them more tolerant of the kind of growing income disparity that other parts of the country haven’t experienced since the 19th
century.
Not every Southern state is alike, of course. And both Texas and Virginia, although right to work states, enjoy circumstances that have allowed for the development of a much broader middle class than in states like Mississippi or South Carolina, for instance. Texas has oil (and the energy industry is heavily unionized), for one thing. But, it is also one of the three states that are, by far, the largest recipients of federal defense dollars (Virginia is number one, Texas number 3).
My question in terms of Right to Work is this; will it ever be accepted, without serious, and perhaps, depending on corporate pushback, violent social and political conflict, in places like Wisconsin that have a very small minority population, a long history of progressive policies that encouraged the growth of a broad middle class, and a lesser dependence on federal dollars than those states that have traditionally been Right to Work?
what other protection against the coporate elite does the middle class have other than collective bargaining?