Once Again, Labor Battles in Michigan

If you're going to kick someone when he's down, it's a good idea to make sure he'll stay down.

Over the howls of organized labor, the Republican majority in the Michigan legislature this week will pass right-to-work legislation. Until now, unions in unionized companies could require that all workers pay union dues as a condition of employment, to prevent them from getting a free ride on gains won by the unions. Right-to-work laws eliminate that requirement, leaving employees free to pay dues or not.

Business groups say right-to-work laws are a blow for worker freedom. Union supporters say they just weaken unions and should be known as right-to-work-for-less laws. The unions have a point: average wages in right-to-work states are usually lower than in states without these laws. 

Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, earlier opposed any right-to-work legislation, saying it would be too divisive, but now says he will sign the measure. Democrats and union leaders vow demonstrations and delaying tactics to keep the bill from becoming law, but their chances are slim. Michigan, the birthplace of the United Auto Workers and one of the union bastions in industrial America, will become the second industrial Midwestern state to become a right-to-work state, after Indiana, where Republican majorities passed a similar bill last year and outgoing Gov. Mitch Daniels signed it.

In the decades-long struggle between business and labor, business just won a battle. Whether it will win the war remains to be seen. The Michigan battle inevitably will energize Democrats and union backers. In the long run, this victory may come back to haunt the victors.

But the fact is that this is a battle that didn't need to be fought. Michigan played a key role in union history and some of the great labor battles were fought there. But this was in the heyday of huge corporations, especially the car companies, which spawned the unions. As these corporations have shriveled and shrunk, so have the unions. Today, only 17 percent of Michigan workers are unionized, and this includes the relatively heavily unionized public service workers.

In other words, unions aren't very important anymore anywhere, including Michigan. Many new firms aren't unionized and some older firms, like the car companies, have persuaded the UAW to accept two-tier wage scales and other concessions that would have led an older generation of union leaders to call a strike. The economic problems of Michigan and other Midwestern states can't be blamed on unions these days, and any solutions don't depend on limiting union power.

The current battle is one of the last skirmishes in a business-labor war that raged a half century or more ago, although no politician will admit it. In private, business leaders in Michigan still rail against unions, as though they still had power. In public, the Republican leaders insist the right-to-work law is just a way to lure businesses to Michigan. In the process, they defend the law with rhetoric that they themselves know isn't true.

"This is not about Republicans versus Democrats," House Speaker Jase Bolger said, even though the votes have been along party lines. "This is not about management versus labor. This does not change collective bargaining. This is not anti-union."

It is, of course, deliberately anti-union. Because union power is so weakened, the law is mostly symbolic. But as any politician knows, symbols are important -- sometimes more important than facts.

At a time when factory wages are stagnant or falling, when unemployment is high, and when robots replace humans on assembly lines, there is growing sympathy for hard-hit workers. Anything that is even perceived as hurting these workers could cause a backlash, even among voters who have never worn a hard hat nor carried a union card.

In the last presidential election, the Republican Party found it needs large groups of people -- immigrants, Hispanics, the young, women -- that it had often alienated, and shows signs of changing policies to embrace them. At this stage in the party's history, it's probably a bad idea to alienate another group -- unionized workers and their unions. Not so long along, the GOP won over large blocs of these so-called "Reagan Democrats." The current battle in Michigan could send them back to the Democrats for another generation. 

Particularly raw was the way this law was passed. The Republican majority, which is due to shrink when the newly-elected Legislature takes its seats in January, literally jammed it through within hours, with little debate and no committee hearings. 

Supporters of the law say it is needed to attract business to Michigan, although there is little evidence that right-to-work laws entice new investment these days. Much of Michigan's old auto industry moved south in the Sun Belt era to escape unions: those huge unionized firms are long gone now. Most new investment comes from small, high-end companies that are unlikely to be unionized anyway. A right-to-work law seems most likely to draw in bottom-feeding companies whose main interest is in saving money on wages, not on attracting high-skill and high-wage employees.

The recent history of anti-labor laws in the Midwest is mixed.

The conclusion seems obvious -- that the law amounts to little more than business taking revenge on hated unions. The same thing has happened in Wisconsin, where a Republican-dominated Legislature crippled public service unions, in Ohio, where Republicans limited the bargaining rights of unions, and in Indiana, with its own right-to-work law. 

In Ohio, voters repealed the anti-collective-bargaining law in a special referendum by a 60 percent margin. But Democratic hopes of recapturing at least one of the two houses in the Legislature in the general election failed.

In Wisconsin, pro-labor attempts to recall Gov. Scott Walker failed, although political analysts there say that even pro-labor voters voted for Walker, because they disliked the idea of a recall election even more than they disliked him. A few months later, Wisconsin went Democratic in the presidential election and elected a new Democratic senator.

In Indiana, neither Daniels nor the Republican Party suffered. Indiana went Republican in the presidential election and the loss of a U.S. Senate seat there had nothing to do with unions.

In Michigan, voters gave a victory just last month to pro-business and anti-union forces when they solidly rejected a proposed state constitutional amendment, called Proposal 2, which would have locked various labor protections into the constitution. Ironically, one part of Proposal 2 would have banned any right-to-work law. 

Comments

[Aaron M. Renn]

I think you do a disservice by not putting this in the context of the unions' failed attempt to use a petition enabled initiative to amend the Michigan constitution to ban right to work and generally add to pro-union legal provisions. This was defeated, and the Republican legislature then declared that a referendum on right to work and passed this law. Unions in Michigan have also worked to undermine the emergency manager laws that allow the state to restructure financially troubled local governments. (Gov. Snyder's strengthened law on this was in fact repealed by voters). This was not some passive strike out of the blue. These unions are big boys who know how to play power politics and have done it for a long time.

Also re:Ohio, if the unions are now irrelevant, how are they able to defeat both the governor and the legislature in a high dollar, high profit statewide referendum? That shows their continued clout right there. Public sector unions in particular continue to inhibit needed reforms in Illinois and across the nation.

[Richard Longworth]

Aaron........You may be right on the merits here -- who threw the first stone in this battle, for instance. My point is that powering this right-to-work law through the Legislature is dumb politics by the Republicans. The Ohio vote you cite is Exhibit A. On a state level, gerrymandered districts leave Republicans in most states in a strong, if not unassailable, position. On a national level, as we saw last month, the Republicans have problems, and statements by their leaders since then show they know it. They have large blocs of voters that they simply have to woo back. It seems an extraordinarily bad them for them to go out of their way to alienate yet another bloc, one that they had successfully penetrated in recent years. I can't imagine that national GOP leaders are thrilled by the news from Lansing.

[Linnaeus]

Prop 2 may not have been a wise move on the part of Michigan labor, but right to work proponents have been laying the groundwork for this since at least the winter of 2011, after Snyder's election and that of Republican majorities in both houses of the Michigan legislature. I suspect that the real impetus for this was the results of the 2012 election, given that the new legislature was less favorable. To say that Prop 2 led to right-to-work could be a bit of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning.

[Linnaeus]

And as for the emergency manager law that Aaron Renn referred to, the Michigan legislature just passed another one that's substantively the same as the one that was repealed. With an appropriation, so it can't be repealed via referendum like last time.

[Cobo rodregas]

With all the hubbub, its important to remember that private sector unions are basically extinct (last I looked only 5-8 pct of private sector jobs are unionized) basically insignificant in the big picture,

"Right to work" is more of a political tool enabling conservatives to continue to use unions as a scapegoat (by tearing them down they are trying to project an image of progress), Allowing for its constituency to ignore the real problems such as the nation wide decline of educational attainment, crumbling infrastructure, decline in personal health, increasing wealth gap, climate change, etc.. Because as we all know, the real enemy to our countries future is employee benefits.

Once unions have been killed off completely the conservative blame machine will find a new target.