Part of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting agenda is including a "right to work" rule for public-sector employees. Several other Republican governors are considering similar measures for both the public and private sectors. Insofar as they succeed, these right-to-work measures will seriously weaken the bargaining power of workers.
"Right to work" is a great name from the standpoint of proponents, just like the term "death tax" is effective for opponents of the estate tax, but it has nothing to do with the issue at hand. It is widely believed that in the absence of right-to-work laws workers can be forced to join a union. This is not true. Workers at any workplace always have the option as to whether or not to join a union.
Right-to-work laws prohibit contracts that require that all the workers who benefit from union representation to pay for union representation. In states without right-to-work laws, unions often sign contracts that require that all the workers in a bargaining unit pay a representation fee to the union that represents the bargaining unit.
The logic is straightforward. When a union is recognized as representing a bargaining unit, it legally must represent every worker in that unit, whether or not a worker opts to join the union.
This means not only that nonmembers get the same wages and benefits that the union negotiates with the employer, but the union is also obligated to represent any nonmember individually if that worker gets in a dispute with the employer over an issue covered in the contract. For example, if a nonunion member is threatened with a discipline action or firing, the union must defend this worker's rights just the same as if they were in the union.
Right-to-work laws prohibit workers from being required to pay for this union representation. What right-to-work laws actually guarantee is the ability for a worker to benefit from union representation without having to pay for union representation.
Copyrights provide a good analogy to this situation. As we know, it costs money to produce recorded music or movies. All the people who take part in the productions, musicians, actors, technical assistants, and others need to be paid.
Copyright is a mechanism that allows these people to be paid for their work. (It is not the only mechanism for financing creative work, but it is currently the main mechanism for generating revenue for those involved in producing creative work.) Under copyright law, the holder of the copyright is given a monopoly over the distribution of the copyrighted material. The copyright holder can sue for damages anyone who distributes or uses copyrighted material without their permission.
If we applied the logic of right-to-work laws to copyright, then copyright holders would be prohibited from taking steps to enforce their copyright. If people chose, they could pay the copyright protected price for music or movies, but they would also have the option to freely download copyright protected material without paying the copyright holder. And there would be nothing the copyright holder could do.
This would be the parallel of "right to work" in the copyright world. As it stands, copyright holders are having a difficult time enforcing their copyrights and getting paid for their work (which might suggest a more modern mechanism for financing creative work would be desirable), but imagine that copyright holders had no legal recourse.
It is unlikely that many people would choose to pay for the music they listened to or the movies that they watched if there was nothing stopping them from enjoying this material without paying. This is the situation in which right-to-work laws put unions.
The outcome is obvious; unions will have a much more difficult time staying in place, as many workers will take advantage of the opportunity to get all the benefits of union representation without paying for them. The unions that do survive will be much weaker if the government forces the union to represent people who don't have to pay for its services.
This is why the states with right-to-work laws have much lower rates of union representation than states without such laws. If the government rigs the deck against unions, then it will be very hard for them to survive, just as it would be hard to sell copyrighted material in a world where copyrights were altogether unenforceable.
Even without right-to-work laws, any worker always has the right to not join a union. If they dislike the union enough, they have the option to work somewhere else, just as they would do if they disliked the employer enough. Of course, workers also can vote out bad union leaders or vote to get rid of the union altogether as well, options that they do not have vis-Ã -vis their employer.
In short, right-to-work laws have nothing to do with protecting the rights of individual workers. They are about reducing the bargaining power of workers: pure and simple. This is the issue at stake in Wisconsin and across the country.
I'm in the semiconductor industry...
I would have a project with new equipment installations or equipment upgrades that would require new facilities hookups that we contracted union workers.
During the project, they would have no incentive to get the job done in a timely manner. Their comments were always "we get paid by the hour".
If there was something that could be finished in 15 minutes but their break time interfered, they would stop and take their break instead of just taking the next 15 minutes to finish and then take their break. When I would ask them why it took over an hour to come back, their response was "our break time does not start until we are all the way out to our truck or trailer in the parking lot". So they would take 15 minutes to walk out of the building to their truck, then take their 30 minute break, then take another 15 minutes to walk. They could have just taken the 15 minutes to complete and then taken their break and I would not have cared. Instead the 15 minutes of work to complete took 1 1/2 hours to complete.
And lunch, they would be gone for 2 hours before returning to where the work was.
This was not an isolated incident; this happened every time we had to use them for construction.
repairs may take days or weeks because of their schedule.
We would then have to do the repairs ourselves because trying to get them to come back to repair the work might take days or weeks. Their shoddy workmanship, but we would have to wait until they could fit it into their schedule to come back and fix it. This happened 25-50% of the time.
In the semiconductor industry waiting days or weeks for someone to come fix their own work is not acceptable. Any time one piece of my equipment is not working, we are losing big money, lots of non production.
As for the days or weeks that it takes that company to schedule your work, it is again the company that you are doing business with not with whether the workers are union or not.
In addition, if the quality of the work is not suitable for your purposes and you continue to contract with that company that is the fault of your company for accepting that quality of work and it again has nothing to do with whether the workers are union or not. Had you exercise your legitimate options under the circumstances you allege you would be contracting with a shop that may or not be a union shop that did meet your needs or the company you presently contract with might have replaced that/those workers. Even in a union shop slipshod workmanship is an offence justifying termination. Your failure to hold the contracting company responsible is the problem, not that it happens to be a union shop.
Watch this:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/triangle/player/
The right to work laws at least give employees a choice and a chance to get out from under the fist of the gangsters that rule most union shops, using union dues to keep the union leaders and their political pawns in power to their mutual benefit and not for the benefit of the employee.
But, better than the alternative.
While I'm mostly pro-union, I know for a fact that this statement is patently false, specifically the word "always."
Please do not bother quoting me what the law says.
Yes, we did indeed pay her unemployment. She could have cost us that account, which may have ended us, and I'm paying her to sit on the couch. You are far, far, from not having "rights" in a right to work state.
That just needed to be said.
In your example, you did infact terminate the employee. Unemployment compensation has not bearing on employee rights.
Employees in at-will states can be fired at any time, for any reason or no reason, as long as they do not fit into one of the very few protected categories - you cannot be fired for age, race, gender, or religious beliefs. Anything else is fair game and is a perfectly legal termination.
A termination can be completely legal and still qualify for unemployment benefits - and, in fact, in a right to work state, a legal but qualifying termination is much easier to accomplish, because you can legally fire someone so easily.
Unions do have a place as MEWAs, for example using dues to buy coverage, rather than bribe politicians. This already exist with craft (plumbers) and arts (screen actors) unions.
My employer owned several small stores which employed 2 persons in each store. The hours were long, 8 to 6. There were no 'lunch hours' or breaks. If you had customers, you had to forego the meal. They were kind enough to give one of us off on Saturday, but the other one had to work. There was no sick time or personal leave. You worked all holidays except Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Labor Day, and then you just got that day off, no leaving early on the eve. We were paid barely over minimum wage, and had to work 42 1/2 hours before you were paid for overtime.
Over the course of several years, some of the workers became ill or had to have surgery and were off for weeks at a time. Guess what...the other worker was expected to pick up the slack and run the store by themselves. This happened to me, I worked 6 weeks alone, only having Sundays off. The employer praised me, saying what a good job I did, that they would remember me at the yearly raises. I got a 3 cent raise. My co-worker, who had cancer, was fired after coming back to work. That's true capitalism.
The problems you state are all solveable without unions.
I'm in the freight business, you never see elderly drivers or dockmen at non-union companies, but you do at the union ones. Why is this? Because as soon as someone hits their 50s at a non-union shop, and the wear and tear of doing physical work for 30 years begins to take its toll and production slips a fraction, they're shown the door. Aged employees at non-union shops are liabilities that need to be eliminated. It all boils down to maintaining production at all costs.
At a union shop the same worker is respected for his experience and allowed to age gracefully with dignity, as they begin to slow down they use their seniority to bid less strenuous positions knowing the union has their back until retirement.
That's job security.
see my post above.
It IS in plain black and white and copied directly from MY employee handbook..