Whose Right Is It Anyway (To Work)?

From the outbox of Meyer’s inbox:

“Indiana could become the first state to embrace a right-to-work law in more than a decade, alarming organized labor proponents who fear a shift in public support for workers’ rights.” That is the opening salvo from the following article from CNN. It delves into the issue that Indiana workers and workers all around the country are facing. If you are already a member of union you could see this as an erosion of union rights. On the other hand, if you are looking for work and a company comes rolling into town because it’s a “right to work” state, you might not really complain. No matter which side you’re on, we can all agree it’s a delightful little wedge issue added to the long list of other wedge issues that wedges us apart from each other.

WHAT RIGHT-TO-WORK LAWS REALLY MEAN

By Elizabeth G. Olson, contributor

FORTUNE — As the economy continues to wobble, the American divide on labor rights is playing out in some unexpected locales. Indiana is in the spotlight now, as it prepares to adopt a law that unions say will weaken their ranks.

If passed, the “right-to-work” law would allow workers to skip paying union dues but still receive the benefits of union-negotiated contracts. Advocates say such employees have been forced into unions, but organized labor calls them “free riders.”

Like the minimum wage, right-to-work battles have flared repeatedly for more than a half-century after workers toiling in onerous circumstances — not unlike what some in Asian factories face today — won the right to unite and bargain for wages and workplace conditions. But the nation never completely embraced a uniform view of worker rights.

In a peculiarly American way of adopting names that can be contrary to what they can mean, proponents called their effort “right to work.” At first glance, this “seems to be a declaration that there is a right to have a job,” notes Dan Graff, a professor with the Higgins Labor Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame, who has studied the impact of such a law in Indiana.

“This country has a different definition of this phrase than everyone else in the world,” he says. “The phrase is deliberately meant to confuse. A Texas newspaper columnist started calling it that decades ago, and it was picked up to mean working without having to be a member of a union.”

Almost half of all states already have such laws, with a concentration in in the Sun Belt, a region that has a less than friendly history with unions. It’s been more than a decade since the last state adopted such a law (Oklahama, in 2001), but the unexpected success of curbing collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin has fueled voices to give corporations a free, or, at least freer, hand in the workplace.

Indiana’s move has alarmed organized labor proponents who fear a shift in public support for workers’ rights and a rolling back of gains workers have made since before World War II.

“If more states pass right to work, unions would lose more members,” says Douglas McCabe, professor of management at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. “It would discourage people from signing authorization cards to be able to hold a vote on unionizing.”

A war of words and statistics

The Indiana Chamber of Commerce argues that more employers would move to Indiana if they had more flexibility to set worker pay, and, at the same time, incomes for residents would rise. The organization asserts that compensation for private sector employees was more than$1,000 a year higher in right-to-work states in 2011 than the salaries of workers in states without such a law, citing figures from the National Institute of Labor Relations Research, a nonprofit group that describes itself as “analyzing and exposing the inequities of compulsory unionism.”
But Graff and Notre Dame economist Marty Wolfson conclude in a separate report that right-to-work laws would deliver low-wage and low-skill jobs to Indiana.

The Indiana Chamber maintains that employment grew 100% in right-to-work states over the 30-year period between 1977 and 2008, and increased only 57% in other states. But the Hoosier state suffered a significant loss of manufacturing jobs during that time while right-to-work states had different economic experiences, such as large population increases, that affected job growth.

Each side of the right-to work argument cites studies to back their views, but a uniform economic prescription is hard to find because individual states have their own, unique economic circumstances, such as availability of skilled workers and access to markets and infrastructure.

Read more about this important issue from CNN Money.