Abstract
This essay examines recent efforts to enact right to work laws and analyzes the impact of such laws on union development. The argument is that right to work is an invidious anomaly in federal collective bargaining policy, and Section 14(b) should be eliminated from the National Labor Relations Act. Proponents of right to work legislation claim that such laws promote economic development, but the evidence for that claim is unconvincing. Alternatively, supporters of the legislation assert that it promotes individual liberties in our market economy. Opponents of right to work challenge the normative dimension of right to work as an empty ideology that cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Right to work is inimical to the economic and social interests of American workers.
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to Professor Devinatz, who invited me to contribute an essay to this symposium. After more than a decade of study, I believe that right to work laws constitute the single most important cause of modern union decline. Those laws have little to do with effective labor policy; instead, they capture a core ideology in American politics. The economic justification for right to work is debatable, but the values underlying the legislation lie at the heart of a worldview that fractures our society—the division between individualists and collectivists. The National Labor Relations Act is our deepest legislative articulation of collectivism, but Section 14(b) of that statute radically embraces individualism. This essay explores the effects of the contradiction.
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Hogler, R.L. How Right to Work Is Destroying the American Labor Movement: From the Ku Klux Klan to the Tea Party. Employ Respons Rights J 23, 295–304 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10672-011-9183-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10672-011-9183-1