Martin Luther King Jr. Opposed ‘Right to Work’

By ROGER BYBEE

As Wisconsin paused to remember the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, some of those piously claiming to honor him were simultaneously preparing to dismantle the very institution in which he fervently believed to be the most crucial ally of civil rights: strong labor unions.

Far-right extremists in the Legislature and powerful corporate forces are now using the “right-to-work” guise to seek legislation whose only goals are the near-total destruction of unions and unchallenged corporate supremacy in Wisconsin.

Dr. King would have surely recognized this “right-to-work” legislative campaign as an effort to permanently transform Wisconsin into a low-wage state where democracy is hollowed out, leaving African-Americans and other working people without any collective voice to seek better lives through the union movement. As Dr. King observed, “The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress.”

But top “right-to-work” advocates like state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos are hardly worried about the “misery and despair” gripping Wisconsin’s working families. Instead, they seek to please their funders like Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the top corporate lobby, and the mega-billionaire Koch brothers. Instead of forthrightly stating their aims, Wisconsin’s hard right incessantly denounces the phantom threat of “forced unionism.” They cynically neglect to mention that current US law very explicitly bans compulsory union membership. Their real target in Wisconsin is actually a reasonable provision in state law that permits a “union-security” fee-for-benefits arrangement. Unions are allowed to expect dues or a smaller “agency fee” from all workers who gain from the unions’ costly efforts to fight for better wages and represent them. When unions lose the right to collect fees for benefits that are costly for them to win, the result has been predictable in “right-to-work” states. Management gains a strong incentive to discourage the payment of dues or fees. This inevitably results in a severe erosion of the union’s voice, their eventual collapse, and a return to total top-down control by corporate CEOs.

In 1961, King told the United Auto Workers that “in the ‘30s, when industrial unionism sought recognition as a form of industrial democracy there were powerful forces which said to you the same words we as Negroes hear now: ‘Never. You are not ready. You are trouble makers. You are interfering with our property rights.’”

Part of the new drive for a “right-to-work” law is strictly economic, feeding an upward re-distribution of wealth to the top 1%. The Congressional Research Service concluded from 2011 figures that states permitting union-security provisions showed sharply higher wages: $50,867 compared to $43,641 for right-to-work states — a difference of 16.6%. Notably, the states with the lowest percentage of union members are the 11 states of the Deep South. (The initial “right-to-work” campaign arose in the former slave states, spearheaded by oil lobbyist Vance Muse who was horrified by labor’s interracial solidarity: “From now on, white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”)

Further, “right-to-work” laws also translate into a new political order: uncontested corporate power and distorted public policy. “Right-to-work” states generally have lower levels of educational attainment, public health, and other indicators of social health, like an infant mortality rate 15% higher than the national average. The devastating human impact of anti-union laws left King outraged by the deceptive use of the “right-to-work” law slogan to weaken the organizations which have been in the forefront of progressive social legislation: “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.

“Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped.”

Dr. King — 47 years after his assassination while fighting for the union rights of sanitation workers in Memphis — has provided us with the clarity needed to recognize this fraud for exactly what it is: a form of disenfranchisement new to our state.

Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based writer and University of Illinois visiting professor in Labor Education. Email winterbybee@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2015

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