Marathon Pundit: Michigan: Big Labor working to subvert right-to-work law

Michigan flag on the left

As Peter Schaumber explains in the Detroit News, Big Labor is working to subvert Michigan's new right-to-work law.

Unions are rushing to circumvent Michigan's right-to-work law before it takes effect using new long-term contracts that lock workers into paying union dues for as long as ten years. This rush to obstruct the law works against the public interest.

For the state legislatures that pass them and the governors who sign them, right-to-work laws that prohibit requiring the payment of union dues as a condition of employment are all about jobs. From 2001 to 2010, employment grew 8.2 percent in right-to-work states and declined 0.5 percent in non-right-to-work states, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, whose state was the 23rd state to pass a right-to-work law, said that on the day the law was passed his "phone began literally ringing…with companies wanting to come to our state."

Pressuring employers to enter into long-term contracts that deprive their employees of the choice the law provides suggests that unions consider collecting dues to be more important than creating jobs. This unfortunate message threatens to further erode public support for unions, which fell 17 percent from 2007 to 2010, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Taylor Federation of Teachers, a local of the American Federation of Teachers, recently convinced the Taylor Public School Board of Education to agree to a highly unusual union security agreement. The agreement requires teachers in the Taylor School District to pay union dues for the next 10 years or be fired. The parties deleted "union security" — a standard provision in collective bargaining agreements in non-right-to-work states — from the party's four-year collective bargaining agreement and placed union security as the sole provision in a separate stand-alone agreement.