Activists protest against Indiana's "right-to-work" legislation at the state capitol (Photo from WXIN)
One of the legacies of the year 2011 will be the nationwide campaign to restrict and repeal the rights and benefits of public employees and unionized workers. Emboldened by the election results of the previous fall, lawmakers and their business allies from Wisconsin to Florida rushed through unprecedented legislation taking aim at the rights of working Americans.
Despite considerable blowback from labor activists and the general public, 2012 gets started with a new front in the war on workers’ rights that promises to reopen a decades-old debate on the right of working Americans to organize.
Dominated by a Republican legislature and a governor who served as a top official in the Bush administration, Indiana is rapidly becoming the latest battleground in the contest over organized labor and the basic rights of employees. Much as Wisconsin was in the first months of 2011, Indiana has become the central focus of an ongoing national struggle between corporations, their operatives in state capitals across the United States, and working Americans.
The Hoosier State is poised to become the latest state with a “right-to-work” law that would basically cut off the ability of organized labor to legitimately function. The title of the law is a ruse; “right-to-work” means anything but that for Americans living in states where the measure is implemented.
The fight over legislation began last year, but the controversy has intensified with the turning of the calendar. Republicans that control both chambers of the state legislature are pushing hard for a vote in the Indiana House; right-to-work legislation has already cleared a key committee despite vigorous opposition from Democrats that has included boycotts.
Businesses and their conservative allies in the legislature insist unions must be crippled in order to create jobs. Democrats, moderate Republicans and advocates for workers’ rights point to the dreadful labor conditions in states that currently have right-to-work laws, and say the bill is a political tool to crush organized labor.
Labor activists have filled the halls of the Indiana Statehouse in a replay of grassroots agitation that opposed Wisconsin’s push to gut public employee benefits and labor rights.
Indiana Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels is a strong supporter of right-to-work, and his recent “state of the state” address generated intense opposition and vocal protests — many opposing lawmakers walked out — as his speech focused on the controversy over the legislation and his advocacy on its behalf.
Gov. Mitch Daniels’ final State of the State address may be remembered more for the reaction than the words: protesters booing in the Statehouse hallways and empty chairs where Democrats should have been sitting.
It likely was a scene never before witnessed in Indiana.
The cause: The controversial “right to work” legislation. The proposal has bitterly divided Republicans and Democrats in the General Assembly. It has galvanized labor union members who see it as a threat, while businesses consider it an economic-development tool.
Democrats stopped the House from coming into session for three days last week — a reprise of the five-week walkout they staged in 2011 over the issue. And though they returned to the House on Monday, any hope of returning to normal business was shattered in the hours before Daniels’ speech. Democrats again shut down the House, angry over how House Republicans handled a hearing on the bill earlier in the day.
And Tuesday night, nearly half the seats where Democrats should have been were empty, as some boycotted this annual televised chance that each governor has to sell his agenda directly to the public.
“I had never seen so many absences. That’s their choice,” House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, said of the Democrats. “I disagree with it, but it’s their choice.”
House Minority Leader B. Patrick Bauer was in his seat, but he said other Democrats stayed away because they knew Daniels would put a “happy face” on the issue.
“Many people can’t be smiling because they’ve lost their job in Indiana or their job has gone down in pay or they’ve lost their health care,” Bauer said. “I don’t think they can be in a happy face-happy place when they know their constituents are hurting.”
Despite its seemingly inexorable march through the state legislature and towards imminent approval in the GOP-controlled House, grassroots opposition may be slowing down Indiana’s right-to-work bill.
Faced with burgeoning public criticism in a state devastated by high unemployment and hemorrhaging good-paying jobs, House leadership will consider an alternative bill that would mandate a public referendum on right-to-work, giving state voters that chance to approve or turn down major changes in state labor laws.
The referendum on right-to-work would be held concurrently with the November presidential election, giving the majority of Indiana voters a chance to have their say on the issue. House Republicans are unlikely to approve such measure, but more moderate GOP lawmakers in the state Senate are supportive as they push their colleagues for changes to House Bill 1001, the right-to-work legislation.
A vote on whether the legislation should go before a public referendum could be held as early as Tuesday.
Opponents of the controversial “right to work” legislation likely don’t have the votes to stop the bill, but they are hoping to pursue an alternative tactic:
Give voters the final say.
Democrats today will push for a referendum in the November election on whether to enact the measure, which bars companies and unions from negotiating contracts that require nonmembers to pay fees.
House Minority Leader B. Patrick Bauer, D-South Bend, said “the people of Indiana have the right to speak their piece by voting” on the issue.
The referendum is among a flurry of amendments Democrats are expected to seek in the Indiana House on House Bill 1001.
Democrats, though, are not the only ones who want changes. At least two Senate Republicans have filed amendments for the Senate version of the bill, including an exemption for the construction trades. Sen. Brent Waltz, R-Greenwood, who wants such an exemption, had joined Democrats in opposing the bill in committee.
Proponents of right-to-work in Indiana and elsewhere, corporations, business groups, and conservative lawmakers, tout the law as a means of creating new jobs and growing manufacturing and other labor-intensive industries that typically have a unionized workforce. Huge numbers of new jobs have been promised, but the data suggests another outcome.
A study done by Ball State University and focusing on the potential for Indiana to go right-to-work finds that the law would have no substantive benefits for the state or its economy. Right-to-work ” is not likely to have an effect” on manufacturing jobs, and some states with anti-union legislation have actually seen jobs and income decline.
An Indiana right-to-work law is not likely to increase the number of manufacturing jobs in the state, according to a new study by Ball State University.
Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research, examined whether the existence of a right-to-work law in the 48 contiguous states and Washington, D.C., led to changes in a state’s industrial composition and manufacturing wages between 1929 and 2006.
“In no model were estimates statistically meaningful, so RTW (right-to-work) legislation does not affect the size of the manufacturing share, inflation-adjusted wages for manufacturing workers, employment in manufacturing nor worker wage rates,” Hicks writes.
Hicks separately assessed the effect of changes in a state’s right-to-work law.
He found most states grew their inflation-adjusted manufacturing income after enacting right-to-work, but Iowa, the right-to-work state most similar to Indiana, and South Carolina saw their manufacturing incomes decline under right-to-work.
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Hicks said his study shouldn’t be interpreted as a call for or against right-to-work in Indiana, but based on the outcome in other states, the legislation “is not likely to have an effect on the manufacturing industry in Indiana.”
Far from being simply ineffective, right-to-work laws have a devastating impact on the rights of employees and, most seriously, their incomes. In a time of a stagnant economy and with many Americans struggling to get by, right-to-work is found to depress wages and annual incomes for workers in states where the law is active.
The dirty little secret about “right-to-work” and other anti-union laws is that they were originally established as a means for white lawmakers in the Jim Crow-era South to block the rise of labor unions that were advocating on behalf of black workers in those states to have their constitutional rights recognized and bring an end to segregation. Right-to-work is basically a tool of Soputhern racists refashioned as a tool of corporate bullying by modern-day politicians.
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, a right-to-work state, while advocating on behalf of the labor rights of African American sanitation workers.
When the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched “Operation Dixie” in the aftermath of World War II, with the goal not just of organizing unions in the states of the old Confederacy but of ending Jim Crow discrimination, Southern segregationists moved immediately to establish deceptively named “right-to-work” laws.
These measures were designed to make it dramatically harder for workers to organize unions and for labor organizations to advocate for workers on the job site or for social change in their communities and states.
In short order, all the states that had seceded from the Union in order to maintain slavery had laws designed to prevent unions from fighting against segregation. The strategy worked. Southern states have far weaker unions than Northern states, and labor struggles have been far more bitter and violent in the South than in other parts of the country. It was in a right-to-work state, Tennessee, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while supporting the struggle of African-American sanitation workers to organize a union and have it recognized by the city of Memphis.
The vast machine behind much of the 21st century proliferation of anti-labor laws designed to curb the rights of workers and demolish organized labor is a shadowy cabal of the most powerful corporations in America. It is the American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful group that seamlessly blends politics with corporate interests.
It’s most influential and insidious talent is that ALEC literally writes scores of laws across the country, putting together draft legislation that they package off to conservative lawmakers in statehouses eager to curry favor with the powerful corporate elite that fill campaign coffers and bankroll super-PAC’s.
ALEC is officially a “non-partisan” and non-profit outfit that has a membership of state legislators and “private sector policy advocates” that dream up some of the nation’s kost toxic new laws, from voter ID legislation to right-to-work.
Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists frustrated by recent electoral setbacks, ALEC is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics. Inspired by Milton Friedman’s call for conservatives to “develop alternatives to existing policies [and] keep them alive and available,” ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals: downsizing government, removing regulations on corporations and making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account. Corporate donors retain veto power over the language, which is developed by the secretive task forces. The task forces cover issues from education to health policy. ALEC’s priorities for the 2011 session included bills to privatize education, break unions, deregulate major industries, pass voter ID laws and more. In states across the country they succeeded, with stacks of new laws signed by GOP governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, both ALEC alums.
The Nation has uncovered details of the hundreds of bills that ALEC’s corporate “advocates” designed and their political allies successfully passed in state legislatures. Corporations are literally allowed to write their own legislation on issues that affect their business and the profits, all without any public scrutiny.
The details of ALEC’s model bills have been available only to the group’s 2,000 legislative and 300 corporate members. But thanks to a leak to Aliya Rahman, an Ohio-based activist who helped organize protests at ALEC’s Spring Task Force meeting in Cincinnati, The Nation has obtained more than 800 documents representing decades of model legislation. Teaming up with the Center for Media and Democracy, The Nation asked policy experts to analyze this never-before-seen archive.
The articles that follow are the first products of that examination. They provide an inside view of the priorities of ALEC’s corporate board and billionaire benefactors (including Tea Party funders Charles and David Koch). “Dozens of corporations are investing millions of dollars a year to write business-friendly legislation that is being made into law in statehouses coast to coast, with no regard for the public interest,” says Bob Edgar of Common Cause. “This is proof positive of the depth and scope of the corporate reach into our democratic processes.”
The representation of some of America’s largest corporation within the power structure at ALEC is staggering. 23 of the nation’s largest and most profitable companies, including Coca-Cola, Koch Industries, and AT&T, comprise the group’s “private enterprise board.”
These companies not only are able to write laws into existence on the state level through their connections at ALEC, they are also some of Corporate America’s heaviest spenders on lobbying and political contributions. House Speaker John Boehner has received nearly $400,000 from companies and their PAC’s that are members of ALEC’s “board.”
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is an ideologically conservative consortium of state legislators and business interests known to draft model legislation for state lawmakers across the country.
“Legislators welcome their private sector counterparts to the table as equals, working in unison to solve the challenges facing our nation,” ALEC’s websites states.
A whistleblower connected to ALEC recently gave the Center for Media and Democracyinformation tying ALEC to hundreds of models for draft legislation — draft legislation that the organization boasts on its website that is not only introduced by state lawmakers but also regularly passed into law.
Twenty-three corporations — including AT&T, Exxon Mobil, Kraft, Coca-Cola and Koch Industries — compose the consortium’s “private enterprise board.”
On the national level, the companies involved in ALEC’s private enterprise board have also been mustering a juggernaut of lobbyists to target congressional initiatives, as well as federal departments like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The breadth of ALEC’s influence has also extended to campaign contributions for a number of candidates, including Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), who received $368,200 from the people and political action committees associated with the companies on ALEC’s private enterprise board during the 2010 election cycle, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s more than any other federal politician.
Do people understand this is an assault on middle class America. An attempt by Republicans to lower the standard of living as we know it in America .Is this want people want? a RACE to the BOTTOM. Vote ALL Republicans out in 2012
You will hear some republicans try to tell you that “Right to work will bring more jobs, We want to do this so that people don’t have to pay union dues or well we will make it so they CAN’T pay union dues through their paychecks because it should be the WORKERS choice” Well in that case I should have my choice to pay my Taxes right? I mean I don’t agree with paying for Union Representation then why can’t I choose to not pay for your lousy representation? Workers need to stand up! whether you like Unions, whether you are apart of a Union right now or not this will affect you. When your wages are lowered, when you are working in unsafe workplaces in the future, when you are working longer hours for less, When you are working in sweatshops like they do over in China… then maybe you will realize you should have stood up for the RIGHTS so many have fought for in the past that you let some no good politicians and their puppet masters take away….
“Right to get fired” is what I call these laws. Our state is a right to get fired state, where any time anyone tries to get a union going they get fired.
Right-to-work=right-to-struggle for workers, right-to-get-away-with-crimes for the corporations.
The race to the bottom begins with you believing that somehow unions are bad and large corporations are good. The big guys go where they can exploit workers the most.