Right-To-Work Goes Viral

All this talk about workers making more or less under certain laws is missing the point. Zero sum games are counter productive. Anyone assuming that workers making more is necessarily better is being a bit foolish. A state can make a law mandating more worker pay tomorrow and put all the businesses out of business. How about the doctors all making more? equality? Can you run an economy where the 9 to 5 greeter makes as much as the night shift utility repairman? The beauty of a free market is that, kept free, wages will settle at the RIGHT level. The key to that is keeping the market free. Collusion and monopoly powers have to be eliminated just as much as legislative intrusions.

http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/right-to-work "The 'right-to-work' movement to destroy labor unions began almost as soon as FDR passed the Wagner Act in the mid-1930s...Until the Wagner Act passed, when it came to workers’ rights, America in the 1930s was about half a century or more behind the rest of the West — child labor wasn’t even outlawed here until 1938." some historical context "...nothing compared to the endless massacres and murders of American labor organizers...the Ludlow Massacre of the families of mine workers at Rockefeller’s mines in Colorado in 1913...Rockefeller’s private armed goons patrolled the miners’ miserable tent cities in an armored car with a mounted machine gun, spraying the tents and terrorizing the strikers, who demanded such radical concessions as 'enforcement of Colorado’s laws,' the eight hour work[day], and pay for time spent working...women and children in the embattled tent city dug a giant makeshift bunker pit beneath one of the larger tents to hide out from the bullets — only to have Colorado National Guardsmen douse the tents with kerosene and light them on fire while the miners’ families were sleeping, then shoot some of those who ran out, killing over a dozen children, scores of workers and their wives, and ending with the arrests of hundreds of miners." "...the West Virginia mine wars: whether the massacre of tent city workers in 1913 by coal miner thugs firing from armored trains passing through the tent cities, or the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, when the company raised the largest private standing army in the US, and attacked strikers with gas shells fired from artillery and dropped from bombers. President Harding followed that up by sending in federal troops and the US Air Force led by Brig. General Billy Mitchell, and when it was over, the miners’ unionization drive was dead. Along with well over 100 workers and family members..." "The "Red Scare" of 1919-20 was aimed at breaking labor unions, and specifically at equating union security...with Bolshevism. ...The Palmer Raids...where J. Edgar Hoover first distinguished himself, resulted in tens of thousands of Americans illegally rounded up, beaten, tortured, imprisoned without any due process, and deported by the thousands..." "Big business in America regarded the rest of the population and its labor pool...as inherently hostile, alien savages whose purpose was to enrich their masters, and who must not be given even the slightest concessions...lest it put ideas in their heads about 'rights'...Americans had no food stamps, no unemployment insurance, no state pensions, and of course, no child labor laws and no labor protections to speak of — all the things labor unions are responsible for giving us today." "...the Ford Motors massacre in Michigan in 1932, which left four workers killed and up to 50 wounded — through the Chicago Memorial Day Massacre of striking Republic Steel workers in 1937, in which company thugs and cops killed 10 peaceful marchers nearly all of whom were shot in the back, and wounded 60 more, billyclubbing the wounded as they crouched in the dirt — America was a savage and violent place to work..." ".in the Senate...the LaFollette Committee Report discovered that corporations not only operated armies of spies in the tens of thousands, but that "Republic Steel Corporation [responsible for the 1937 massacre] has a uniformed police force of nearly 400 men whom it was equipped not only with revolvers, rifles, and shotguns...with more tear and sickening gas and gas equipment than has been purchased...by any law-enforcement body, local, State or Federal in the country. It has loosed its guards, thus armed, to shoot down citizens on the streets and highways," the Senate report observed. That was the arsenal controlled by just a single steel company." "FDR leveled the workplace playing field some with the Wagner Act, for the first time making union security (closed shop) a reality. Labor union power and membership soared, as did wages and benefits; America suddenly had Social Security and unemployment insurance, child labor laws, a minimum wage, five day/40 hour work week, and within a few years, a powerful middle class. "To big business plutocrats, the New Deal labor laws represented a sort of political Holocaust that they never forgot or forgave. ...business vowed that one day it would have its revenge. And that revenge would be 'right to work' laws."

Steam engines, landline phones, Labor Unions and newspapers are things of the past. Who in his right mind would like some thugs and mafiosi to negotiate on his/her behalf? May be some dumb, uneducated people. Surprising there are still some around in 21st century. Look at Trumka at his face - he looks like Neandethal - how can you possibly trust him, I wouldn't give him a dime. I also wondering if there are unions in Tesla plant in Fremont. I would be surprised if there are - it is against innovative culture of Silicon Valley.

You'd have to be a simpleton not to see this is simply political. The same good folks who want to limit early voting and trim voting hours.