If one Democratic candidate has their way, it will soon be the end for “right-to-work” laws. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), a leading Democratic contender in the 2020 presidential race, announced on Saturday that she would use her “bully pulpit” to fight “right-to-work” laws, which she described as an attack on workers’ rights.
“The barriers to organized labor being able to organize and strike are something that have grown over a period of time,” she said during a speech at the National Forum on Wages and Working People.
Using her bully pulpit
Harris promised to use her executive authority to fight for workers’ rights. “It has to be about, for example, banning right-to-work laws,” she asserted.
.@KamalaHarris says she will use the “bully pulpit” and ban right to work laws in her fight on behalf of unions. pic.twitter.com/BufbcJweTm
— Cameron Cawthorne (@Cam_Cawthorne) April 27, 2019
For years, states like Michigan and Virginia have been the scene of legal battles over right-to-work laws that allow employees to exempt themselves from joining a union and paying its fees. The debate appeared settled last year, however, with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which said that mandatory public union membership violates the First Amendment.
By undoing these hard-fought legal victories, Harris would allow labor unions to gain force American workers to join their organizations and pay their often outrageous union fees, which often end up in Democratic campaign coffers, regardless of the worker’s political preferences.
She joins radical socialist legislators like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who has said that he will work to undo the right-to-work laws that now exist in 27 states.
Democratic money-making machine
President Donald Trump, conversely, has been a champion of right-to-work laws. Following the Supreme Court’s Janus decision in June, he called the ruling a “big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!”
Supreme Court rules in favor of non-union workers who are now, as an example, able to support a candidate of his or her choice without having those who control the Union deciding for them. Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2018
Private sector unions collect an estimated $4.6 billion annually in mandatory dues, according to a study in the National Right to Work Committee. Much if that income is funneled into “unreported campaign operations to elect and control congressional majorities dedicated to higher taxes and increased government spending,” the organization contends.
“[U]nions have greatly increased their financial commitment to political activity in recent election cycles as a way to achieve in the political process the gains that have eluded them at the bargaining table,” economist James T. Bennett wrote in the Journal of Labor Research.
Trump, who is neither pro-union nor anti-union, also defended right-to-work during his 2016 campaign. “We’ve had great support from [union] workers, the people that work, the real workers, but I love the right to work,” he said at the time. “I like it better because it is lower. It is better for the people.”
Once considered a settled issue, members of an increasingly radical Democratic Party establishment are promising to take away the freedom of American workers to choose whether or not to join a labor union.
Regardless of who wins the Democratic primary in 2020, right-to-work laws promise to feature prominently in the presidential debates.
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