We have had Republican leaders across the nation
talk about the jobs that they were going to create. But they never explain that their object is to
suppress wages, health and retirement benefits so their rich donors can realize
greater profits for their members. Among
the leading suspects are the Chamber of Commerce, the National Right to Work Committee
and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
One way they hope to do this is by compromising the
right of workers to organize.
Virginia hopes to continue this race to the bottom
for our workers by extending what I call “the new slavery.”.
It’s the opening act in in the General Assembly
Session convened this Wednesday in Richmond, Virginia.
They wrongly represent the initiative as the “right
to work,” but every working man and woman who has tried to bargain with a
company, knows what it really means is a “right to work for less.”
In 1908 the Supreme Court thought that it was just fine
for an employer to require a worker not to join a union as a condition of his
employment. The War Labor Board from the
First World War reversed field when it forbade employers from interfering this
way. In 1926, Congress passed the
Railway Labor Act that prohibited any
interference with an employees’ right of self-organization. In 1935, congress passed the Wagner Act (the
National Labor Relations Act) that authorized the “union shop” meaning that, if
a union had a contract with an employer, that an employee had to join that
union.
The “union shop” policy was against moochers,
against free riders, like if someone were to hop a metro turnstile to get a
free ride while others paid.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Evan Hughes held
that the Wagner Act was a statute that “safeguard[ed] the right of employees to
self-organization and to select representatives of their own choosing for
collective bargaining” without “restraint or coercion by their employer.”
In 1947, a Republican-controlled Congress passed the
Taft-Hartley Act, over the veto of President Harry Truman, that said states
could bar the “union shop” if they chose.
Virginia hurried to pass such a provision; now this Session of the
General Assembly will consider making this abuse of workers, barring any “union
shop,” a part of Virginia’s constitution.
The Reverend Martin Luther King said, “[W]e 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
now have 24 states with “right to work for less” laws and, just as Reverend
King said, the average worker in those states makes less, is more likely to be
uninsured, the poverty rates are higher, also the infant mortality rates, and they
spend less on educating their children, and have a higher rate of work place
deaths.
We
have seen American companies go off shore and abuse workers there and give them
that competitive advantage, because they pay so little, work so long, in
overcrowded conditions, with underage workers in dangerous work places. Some lament how manufacturing has gone abroad
but buy these products because they are cheaper, ignoring the abuses that make
these products so competitive.
Before
the Civil War, Whig Representative Richard Yates of Illinois was concerned about
how slavery in the territories would hurt free laborers; Yates said in the
Congress, “The free laborer does not wish the labor of slaves to come into
competition with his labor. The effect
of slave labor is always to cheapen, degrade and exclude free labor.”
Our
Virginia legislature may again “cheapen, degrade and exclude free labor.”
Nothing
has changed to alter Rep. Yates’ common sense observation that workers, who are
constrained by force of law as to how they may bargain to earn higher wages and
benefits, prompt a cheapening and degradation of what other workers may expect
to earn as well.
Many
have seen the movie, Lincoln, about
the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing
“slavery” and “involuntary servitude,” as if it was an historical artifact
without application to this world but we have a “new slavery” in the Old
Dominion and in America; it is the constraint upon the working man and woman --
and not just with regard to this attack on the right to have a union shop.
The
Thirteenth Amendment applies to the conduct of both public and private
parties. In 1968, the Supreme Court said
that even private discrimination under the Thirteenth Amendment may constitute
prohibited “badges of slavery.” Even by
the first provision of the Thirteenth Amendment, this so-called right to work
law causes “involuntary servitude” by those worker’s representatives who are
required by federal law to fairly represent a worker while state legislation withholds
the expense of that representation in its prohibition against union shops.
The
South has been brazen in its extension of the New Slavery for our workers, and
would make this abuse of workers part of the Old Dominion’s Constitution. We’d like to think they’re better than that. But we’ve seen what they can do.
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