Right to Work Blog

Smelling blood — and a chance for another vote to end employee secret ballot elections — union bosses in Indiana are bankrolling the upstart campaign of Michael Montagano against incumbent Mark Souder.

Souder, who has called the Card Check Scam Bill a license to intimidate workers, is under attack by Montagano whose campaign is funded almost exclusively by Big Labor money. The Journal Gazette reports that Big Labor has:

. . . contributed more than $130,000 to Montagano’s campaign operation – $20 of every $100 in total donations; 75 percent of all the political action committee money.

It’s more cash than unions donated to Souder’s last six challengers combined.

Andre Lacy, the Chairman of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, weighs in on the need for Indiana to enact a Right to Work law:

Increasing Hoosier incomes is among our state’s greatest challenges. Indiana must compete globally for jobs and investment, building economic opportunity for our citizens. Key to achieving this goal and winning the competition for new jobs is the removal of self-imposed impediments. Adopting a right-to-work law will increase investment, incomes and economic opportunity for Hoosiers.

Lacy notes the overwhelming evidence that Right to Work is a benefit to workers and taxpayers:

. . . The effect on economic development and personal income is dramatic, well documented, and it contrasts sharply with those states – such as Indiana – that lack right-to-work laws.

The evidence is overwhelming.

In 2005, Colgate-Palmolive Co. decided to shutter its toothpaste factory in Clarksville and moved to a right-to-work state. In this instance, Indiana’s lack of a right-to-work law cost 475 Hoosiers their jobs and livelihoods.

Numerous studies show that personal income in right-to-work states grew almost twice as fast as that in non-RTW states between 2001 and 2006. During this same time, manufacturing in RTW states grew almost three times as fast as in non-RTW states. Growth in construction employment was also greater in those states with right-to-work laws.

In a 2002 study entitled “The Effect of Right-to-Work Laws on Economic Development,” economist William T. Wilson of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy compared Michigan’s economic performance to right-to-work states. Wilson found that during the 30 years between 1970 and 2000, RTW states created jobs nearly twice as fast as did Michigan. While poverty rates dropped dramatically during these 30 years, Michigan was one of seven states (all lacking right-to-work laws) that witnessed an increase in the percentage of residents living in poverty. Finally, the study showed that right-to-work states created 1.43 million manufacturing jobs, while non-right-to-work states lost 2.18 million manufacturing jobs during the same three decades.

Another 2002 study conducted for and published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis focused on the experience of Idaho (whose RTW law took effect in 1986) from 1987 through 2000. It concluded that Idaho experienced significant growth in investment and manufacturing employment after adopting right to work. Specifically, Idaho’s annual manufacturing “employment growth rate was about 3.7 percent post-law, compared with an almost zero annual average growth rate pre-law.”
Furthermore, the “growth rate in the number of establishments was about seven times larger compared with that in the pre-law period. Idaho did much better after the RTW law was passed, compared with most other states in the region, both in employment and in the number of establishments. . . . ”

Lacy’s conclusion is both obvious and correct:

. . . Adopting right-to-work will benefit two very broad groups of Hoosiers – workers and taxpayers. This reform will not be easy or without organized opposition. Doing so, however, will send a strong signal that Indiana is open for business and serious about increasing job opportunities for all Hoosiers.

In addition to the quarter of a billion dollars the AFL-CIO will spend to elect pro-Big Labor puppets across the nation, the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) will spend an incredible $75 million in forced-union-dues money between now and November.

The New York Times noted:

The union’s secretary-treasurer Anna Burger said the SEIU would devote money and staff to Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia. The union’s strategy appears to dovetail with the Obama campaign’s plans to compete in those states, all three of which President Bush won in 2004.

At a strategy briefing last week, campaign manager David Plouffe said “we think we’re in a very strong position” in North Carolina and Virginia and he indicated Mr. Obama would not be ceding the mountain West to Senator John McCain either. Mr. Obama chose the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs as the venue to talk up his national service agenda on Wednesday.

Ms. Burger said the union, which endorsed Senator Obama in February, would also pour resources for both the presidential contest and down-ballot races into the perennial battlegrounds of Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, among others, as well as governor’s races in Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina and Washington State.

To add insult to injury, the $75 million total does not include a $10 million bounty the union bosses have set aside to ensure that pro-Big Labor politicians don’t ever vote the interests of union members instead of the union leadership.

The Northwest Indiana Times reports that “[n]onunion workers at the Hilton Garden Inn construction site . . .” in Hobart, Indiana, “. . . were victims of an attack that went well beyond a union-based picket line.”

Project Superintendent Kim Lackey was cited in the report:

“We were verbally harassed and property was damaged,” she said. “These people acted like a mob of crazy lunatics.”

Lackey said that Friday, the day of the union pickets, workers at the site found evidence of vandalism, including 14 slashed vehicle tires, a cut phone line to the trailer and epoxy glue in the locks on the gate and the framer’s trailer.

Lackey and other workers said the union representatives spewed both racially and sexually biased slurs at them, including targeting Hispanics, blacks and women.

“They were totally out of line,” she said.

Indeed!

As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Friederich A. von Hayek wrote, “[T]he coercion which unions have been permitted to exercise . . . is primarily the coercion of fellow workers.”

Walter Williams, a respected economist and syndicated columnist, has been more blunt.

“The union struggle is not against employers,” Mr. Williams wrote. “It is against workers. One way you see this is to ask: Who gets beat up or killed during a strike? It’s not the owners or management; it’s workers who’ve disagreed with the union and wish to work.”

The coercive powers union officials wield courtesy of federal labor law not only rob individual employees of fundamental freedoms, but exert a damaging and corrupting influence on work places, the economy, and other aspect of everyday American life.