Not Right to Work: Right to Freeload

Because when you accept all the benefits of someone else's effort without paying for it, that's freeloading.

But Right to Freeload laws aren't about rights, or freedom or even work. They're about turning workers into serfs and taking away our power.

Down with Tyranny:

The speaker in the clip above is a Michigan state Rep from Grand Rapids, Brandon Dillon and, as you can see, Rep. Dillon is fuming about the House Republicans jamming through Right to Work for Less legislation in the lame duck session with no public input, no hearings, and no opportunity for amendments. Republicans will lose 5 seats in the House in January-- and this bill passed by 4. "That’s shameful," he told his Republican colleagues. "That’s not democracy. This is where democracy goes to die today. Because the majority in this state who lost 52% of the vote in state House races doesn’t have the guts to defend this."

A few weeks ago, Michigan voters chose President Obama over native son Mitt Romney, 2,564,569 (54.2%) to 2,115,256 (44.7%). At the same time voters showed an overwhelming preference for Democrat Debbie Stabenow over Republican Pete Hoekstra. She beat him 2,735,826 (58.8%) to 1,767,386 (38.0%). Only Republican gerrymandering of legislative and congressional districts gave the GOP anything to cheer about. Can they still win a statewide race in Michigan? They're not taking any chances. That's why they're busy ramming through an extreme agenda that ramps up the right-wing war against working families and against women.

Scott Lemiuex, Lawyers Guns and Money: 

I’m reluctant to tease Yeselson’s piece on the Michigan loss last week because it’s all excellent, but this general point is a good introduction to the specific claims about the state:

The vaunted libertarian argument in support of right to work would be far more convincing if libertarians supported the rights of employees to reject at their discretion the countless rules and obligations that employers mandate as a condition of employment. The argument seems to be that employees are free either to quit a job or not take it in the first place if they find various company requirements—e.g., what time they are to come to work—onerous or unpleasant. Libertarians do not argue, however, that workers have the right to retain their employment yet arrive at work at noon if their employer wishes them to arrive at 9. Don’t start, or quit, but if you’re on the job, follow the boss’s rules, right?
Yet we are to believe that only the requirement that workers must join a union or else compensate the union for work it will do on his or her behalf constitutes a grave blow to the worker’s economic freedom. Despite the high-minded justifications proffered by some of its defenders, right to work has no distinguished, abstract theoretical pedigree, no elevated standing in the mansion of Western political theory. It’s a snarling pit bull of a policy that disempowers the institutional voice of employees—unions—for the benefit of corporations. Most of the wealthy states don’t have right-to-work laws, and most of the poor ones do. Workers in right to work states make less than those in non-right-to-work states, and their unions have fewer resources to fight the corporations and politicians who benefit from this lopsided system. That’s the idea.

Real the whole etc. See also MacGillis — this is the latest example of why trusting “moderate” Republicans is likely to leave you with nothing but the barrel that will constitute your wardrobe going forward.

And the wonderful Dave Zirin at The Nation, with the final word (emphasis mine):

I also asked DeMaurice Smith [executive director of the National Football League Players Association, which opposes right-to-freeload laws] how he responded to people who say that this is just unions standing up for other unions with no care for workers. His answer stands as a terrifically important response to those standing with Snyder and the Koch brothers on this issue.

Smith answered, “I used to say that we have forgotten a lot of the lessons from organized labor over the last 100 years, but I’m now convinced that we never learned them. Whether you're talking about fire escapes outside of buildings or sprinkler systems inside of buildings, fair wages for a days work, laws that prevent child labor, things that led to the abolishing of sweatshops in America, let alone management contributing to healthcare plans or a decent pension.… all those things over the last 100 years were not gifts from management. Someone in a corporate suite didn’t decide one day that they would bestow that wonderful right upon a working person. The way those rights were achieved was through the collective will of a group of workers who stood together and said, ‘This is what we believe is fair, and we are all going to stand together and demand that those things be provided to us. We’ll do it as a collective group. You may be able to pick off one of us or two of us or five of us, but you will not be able to pick off all of us.’ When you look at legislation that is designed to tear apart that ability to work as a team…that is not just anti-union. That is anti–working man and woman, and that’s why we weighed in.”

The fight is certainly not over in Michigan. Those opposing right-to-work legislation however are going to need to expand the planned protests and civil disobedience in the coming week. It’s safe to say that it would make a substantial difference to this struggle if members of the Detroit Tigers and Detroit Lions take a cue from their own union executive boards and make their way down to the capital.

Support union-dues-paying-workers, not freeloaders.