Michigan becomes 1st state in decades to repeal right to work

February 13, 2024 7:15 PM

Maybe a glimmer of hope for today...

New Michigan laws approved by Democrats take effect Tuesday, ushering in changes to a slew of policies from labor to abortion rights. These laws received little or no Republican support in the state Legislature.
Naturally.

Right-to-work repeal and prevailing wage reinstated--
On a party-line vote, Democrats repealed Michigan's "right-to-work" law that had allowed workers in unionized workplaces to opt out of paying union dues. About half of U.S. states have right-to-work laws in place. With the repeal, Michigan became the first state in nearly 60 years to abandon the policy, which is opposed by labor advocates.

Other good things happening in Michigan

posted by BlueHorse (26 comments total)

One gets the sense that Midwestern Dems have had a political near-death experience under Republican gerrymandering, misrule, and attempts to end democracy -- it arguably did end in Wisconsin for over a decade -- and are working overtime to deliver for their constituents in order to avoid falling permanently into the electoral abyss. The complacent legislatures and governors in some "safely" blue states could draw a lesson from that (and flipping George Santos's old seat is a good start!)
posted by Rhaomi at 7:49 PM on February 13 [19 favorites]

I am happy that Michigan recognized that unions should not be obligated to negotiate agreements for workers that do not pay for that representation.

I'm disappointed Michigan didn't take the simpler, and more free, solution of allowing unions to simply not negotiate for non-member employees. If unions provide valuable services, they should have no problem with employees voluntarily joining the union to take advantage of those services.
posted by saeculorum at 7:49 PM on February 13 [3 favorites]

I have heard nothing bad about Gretchen Whitmer. I'm sure there are policies I disagree with but every time I see her name I think "great!" (Except the time she was targeted by kooks, of course.

I'm disappointed Michigan didn't take the simpler, and more free, solution of allowing unions to simply not negotiate for non-member employees.

Is that actually illegal? I thought generally the unions were the ones who wanted the collective bargaining agreement to require all employees at a given company or workplace to be union members, not federal or state law. Googling seems to confirm this, but I haven't worked at a site with a strong union presence in over 30 years.
posted by mark k at 8:07 PM on February 13 [1 favorite]

I'm disappointed Michigan didn't take the simpler, and more free, solution of allowing unions to simply not negotiate for non-member employees. If unions provide valuable services, they should have no problem with employees voluntarily joining the union to take advantage of those services.

That's not how solidarity works.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:33 PM on February 13 [43 favorites]

I'm disappointed Michigan didn't take the simpler, and more free, solution of allowing unions to simply not negotiate for non-member employees.

People should be able to opt out of representation by not paying their taxes, too! (/s, obviously)
posted by klanawa at 9:57 PM on February 13 [14 favorites]

Management represents the capital stakeholders of a company. They are shielded from liability beyond their investment and gain certain rights over the enterprise. Unions represent the worker stakeholders of a company.

Under this model, a person option out of the union is akin to a person opting out of being managed.

Similarly capital/management bypassing the union with workers is akin to the union bypassing management and just claiming the capital of the company.

It is a model of regulated capitalism. In Germany the workers/union gets have of the board of directors, and its productivity per hour worked matches the USA, so this isn't economic suicide.
posted by NotAYakk at 10:59 PM on February 13 [10 favorites]

People should be able to opt out of representation by not paying their taxes, too! (/s, obviously)

This isn't the slam dunk argument you may think it is for a whole lotta people.

That's not how solidarity works.

Solidarity doesn't really work at all if it's not voluntary.

I wish for once I'd hear an argument for unions that didn't make them sound like HOAs, or rely on the pleas that "if only everyone would just get on board". It's one thing to regain pro union laws in a state where there has a tradition of strong union membership. Quite another in a state that's been traditionally hostile to unionization from the bottom up.
posted by 2N2222 at 4:20 AM on February 14 [2 favorites]

I'm disappointed Michigan didn't take the simpler, and more free, solution of allowing unions to simply not negotiate for non-member employees.

This is exactly the same union-busting intent of “right-to-work” in a slightly different hat. Corporations don’t punish workers for not joining the. Union by treating them worse; in fact, Starbucks has been trying to punish its unionizing workers by offering perks to those that haven’t .
posted by Horace Rumpole at 4:50 AM on February 14 [21 favorites]

I've never been in a union and probably never will (not out of opposition, but it's just really rare in my line of work). But an in-law of mine was, and it was striking how much better their pay and work conditions were than if they had done the same work in a non-union setting. Unions aren't perfect and plenty have been involved in shady dealings, but it's hard not to see how strong unions have lifted conditions for workers generally, and how deceitful a lot of anti-union arguments are.

in fact, Starbucks has been trying to punish its unionizing workers by offering perks to those that haven’t .

Starbucks seems to be going from one shady practice to another on this as they try to fight it. It's clear how much of a threat the corporate leadership thinks a unionized workforce would be.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:09 AM on February 14 [22 favorites]

I think less-than-wholly-voluntary solidarity is damn close to the only kind there is. Maybe I'm weird.

I can certainly agree, on a less-exalted plane, that unions work better without free riders. In that sense, as I prep to take minutes at today's meeting of our local, I'm quite happy at what Michigan has done and I hope Wisconsin can crawl after it. (Where we Sconnies are politically right now, it's gonna be a crawl at best.)
posted by humbug at 6:22 AM on February 14 [1 favorite]

Starbucks seems to be going from one shady practice to another on this as they try to fight it. It's clear how much of a threat the corporate leadership thinks a unionized workforce would be.

And how toothless they consider the NLRB and other regulatory & law enforcement agencies to be in this regard.
posted by Gelatin at 6:54 AM on February 14 [2 favorites]

Starbucks is probably correct about that, given where SCOTUS is heading with Chevron.

Anyway. Good job, Michigan.
posted by ZaphodB at 7:20 AM on February 14 [1 favorite]

I wont harsh the union benefits buzz by detailing my past attempts to unionize fellow workers.

Instead, I'll say, please also note the other laws enacted related to gun safety, LGBTQ and abortion rights.

I'm a senior in Michigan. And as with the US Federal government, Michigan has had such absolutely horrendous Republican-led governments that seeing these kinds of laws enacted is practically utopian.

And national MAGA - you're going to hear a lot more from, to paraphrase, those women from Michigan.
posted by NorthernLite at 7:42 AM on February 14 [11 favorites]

In this thread: people dissing on unionism who do not understand what unionism is for.

It is possible to work a career in America as a not-union-member-private-employee, and not ever have to work for the kind of shitty owner that makes unions necessary. If you have been so lucky, you might be under the mistaken impression that owners have improved morally since the days when they routinely massacred unruly workers who had the temerity to demand enough pay to keep their families eating. You might think that "unions aren't needed anymore" because of the improvements in working conditions that unions won.

You would be wrong about that. We're about a half of another Trump administration away from some employer using deadly force as a workplace discipline measure and getting away with it. On the other hand we might be one more Biden Admin away from a revitalization of American unionism, which would turn the tide in the other direction.

For unionism to work, workers have to belong to the union. It's right there in the name.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:30 AM on February 14 [16 favorites]

Dip Flash: "... it was striking how much better their pay and work conditions were ..."

I see what you did there.
posted by bryon at 9:08 AM on February 14 [8 favorites]

This isn't the slam dunk argument you may think it is for a whole lotta people.

Those people aren't generally amenable to argument anyway. Libertarians, Trump supporters, anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers... you know, morons.
posted by klanawa at 10:06 AM on February 14 [8 favorites]

A rising tide lifts all ships. A union protects all workers. Are unions perfect? No, because their members are not perfect. Are they the only alternative to benevolent dictatorship? Yes.
posted by gwydapllew at 1:20 PM on February 14 [4 favorites]

Having worked in a non-union journalism job and a union teaching position I've seen how unions can protect their members from the crap that management can pull.
Anyone who is a worker and is anti union has somehow been duped.
Congrats Michigan!
posted by cccorlew at 2:09 PM on February 14 [7 favorites]

I have heard nothing bad about Gretchen Whitmer. I'm sure there are policies I disagree with but every time I see her name I think "great!" (Except the time she was targeted by kooks, of course.)

I'm not excusing what happened to her, but I sometimes wonder if Gretchen Whitmer and the policies coming out of Michigan are so good right now precisely because Whitmer was targeted for kidnapping and assassination by fascists. If you've survived something like that, you might feel a lot more urgency in what you do for that very reason. If I were her, I'd have a needlepoint sampler that said, "Look upon thine field of fucks, and see that it is barren."
posted by jonp72 at 2:20 PM on February 14 [2 favorites]

The Chameleon podcast has started a season investigating the attempted Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping. Fascinating so far.
posted by doctornemo at 3:34 PM on February 14

If only the NLRB could borrow Lina Khan and co for a little from the FTC. They seem to be hinting at trying to consider sticking it to the man.
posted by shenkerism at 3:38 PM on February 14 [1 favorite]

> solution of allowing unions to simply not negotiate for non-member employees

The whole problem that unions are designed to solve, is that businesses and companies inevitably tend towards large, monolithic, top-down organizations that have everything but the worker's best interests as their priority.

Against that, huge, monolithic, and very well-funded machine you have all the resources of the lone individual.

This is, by its very nature, an immensely unequal contest - one that is tilted hugely in favor of the business and against the individual.

You can come up with a lot of solutions to this massive structural inequity. Organizing workers into unions is one of the very best that has ever been attempted.

If not unions, it has to be something that is - to a great degree - their essential equivalent.

Whatever entity is working on behalf of the workers has to be as large and as powerful and as structurally dedicated to defending the workers as the business is in maximizing its profits.

If it's not that strong and that powerful and that unified, it will simply be steamrollered by the massive unified power of the business interests.

So feel free to propose other solutions. But those will never be simply the "freedom" of "individuals" - were you end up with a group of independent "free" individuals on one side and monolithic huge wealthy corporations on the other side.

Just for example, a possible solution would be to dismantle the corporations until their size and power is roughly equivalent to that of an independent worker.

Then fine - let the market do it's magic and it will probably do pretty well. For a while, that is: Until the business interests again, inevitably, coalesce into larger and larger entities designed to maximize profits to the greatest degree possible. While the workers remain independent, individual, and comparatively powerless.

Whatever we have working in favor of workers, it has to be as powerful and as unified as the businesses and corporations it is working with - there must be a balance of power in place there.

Right now, in the U.S., the balance of power is tilted massively towards businesses and large corporations.
posted by flug at 8:01 PM on February 14 [6 favorites]

> solution of allowing unions to simply not negotiate for non-member employees

And to be a little more specific, that is not at all, in a realistic way, how these negotiations work. Even if there is somehow a union and a non-union wage for the very same job at the very same plant - which is not usually the situation - the non-union wages are inevitably driven upwards towards the union wages because they very much tend to set the market.

So the situation you have is everyone is benefitting from X but only 40% (or whatever) of the benefitting population is helping to pay the cost of X. It is like the very definition of the free rider problem.

Second, whenever you repeat some anti-union talking point, please keep repeating to yourself as you do so, that you are repeating the anti-union propaganda that the "business community" has worked their asses off for more than a century to build into everyone's mindset about unions.

Apparently, they've won the battle. They have our hearts and minds to the point that we don't even consciously realize that we're doing nothing but repeating their self-serving talking points.

But before you open your mouth to give voice to their propaganda, just ask yourself: Are they paying me to do this?

Because if they're not paying me to be their lobbyist or their propagandist, why am I spending time working on their behalf, making their arguments for them?
posted by flug at 8:19 PM on February 14 [10 favorites]

the non-union wages are inevitably driven upwards towards the union wages because they very much tend to set the market.

I don't get how that has to be the case. Unions can offer value for the company they work with - they can be selective about who joins the union, and they can aggressively manage the performance of folks in the union. They can promote the professional development of folks in the union, and add additional value to the company over time. The union can then reasonably go to the company and demand higher wages in exchange for quantifiably better productivity/labor/etc. I would love to join such a union. The flip side is that such a union would necessarily have to cover only specific members. This model of unions has been very successful in construction trades - like electricians in particular. The broad non-existence of such unions has been disappointing to me.
posted by saeculorum at 9:02 AM on February 15

But companies don’t offer better wages for any of those reasons. They offer better wages when, and only when, they are compelled to by worker power. They reserve everything else for profit.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:50 AM on February 15 [8 favorites]

This model of unions has been very successful in construction trades - like electricians in particular.

So, back when I was fresh out of college, and needing to get a job because money, I got a position working as a customer service agent for the local teleco. The position was organized, but due to a quirk of fate, we were not organized under the Communication Workers of America (CWA - the usual union that covers such workers), but the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) - that is, the very union you are "praising" for their exclusivity. And they made sure to protect us just as much as any other union. (I didn't last long in the job, but that was a function of the company lying about the sales aspect.)

There are few "unions" that use the "guild" model you refer to, because it turns out that solidarity is a much more powerful tool. I recommend reading up on the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in response to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) being unwilling to organize minorities as part of their exclusivity.
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:32 PM on February 16 [2 favorites]