Editorial: Chasing the right-to-work rainbow in Michigan

Unfortunate, yes. Wrongheaded, yes. Shortsighted, you bet. But any claim that allowing workers to opt-out of paying union dues — even as they enjoy benefits won through collective bargaining — will create jobs is not backed by evidence.

Instead, right-to-work is one of those cherished conservative myths, like voter impersonation and tax-cuts-create-jobs, fostered by the wealthy to further their own interests.

The most thorough study of the issue was done in 2007 by Lonnie K. Stevans of Hofstra University. He found that right-to-work-states see a slight uptick in the number of new businesses, but “little ‘trickle-down’ from business owners to the non-unionized workers.”

The study found that wages and personal income are lower in right-to-work states than in union-shop states, but business owners make more money.

There are other reasons why business lobbyists support right-to-work. Maybe it’ll knock a few bucks off labor costs. More likely it will undermine the power of union shops, enabling employers to write more onerous work rules. Maybe it will encourage some bottom-feeding companies to relocate, pay lower wages and reap short-term gains.

But long term, it’s no way to build an economy.

Michigan’s Republican-dominated legislature bought all the wrong arguments Tuesday, giving final passage to a right-to-work measure, which Rick Snyder, the state’s Republican governor, signed so fast his pen left scorch marks on the paper.

Republican politicians stand to gain by weakening the state’s unions, particularly the United Auto Workers. Union dues, in Michigan and around the country, are a major source of Democratic political contributions.

Unfortunately, just as the American middle class rose to respectability on the backs of labor unions, so has it suffered with their demise. Union wages set the standard for labor costs. Even an employer who ran a non-union shop had to pay competitive wages to get and keep high-quality workers.

Wages today are stagnant; the median household income hasn’t moved, in buying power, for more than four decades. At the same time, the percentage of Americans in private-sector unions has plummeted to less than 7 percent.

These figures are not a coincidence. Together with the “zations”— mechanization, computerization and globalization — the war on unions has made the United States a buyer’s market for unskilled or semi-skilled labor. The days when a kid could get out of high school, move to the factory floor and spend the next 40 years proudly supporting his family are all but gone.

Today unions are strongest in the public sector, where citizens are the ultimate employer. The irony there is a private-sector employee, who no longer has a union to bargain for wages and benefits, becomes upset with the wages and benefits of unionized teachers, firefighters and police officers, giving cover to GOP office holders.

Michigan’s new right-to-work law covers some public workers, but not cops and firefighters, whose unions tend to endorse Republicans. Elections have consequences.

Many unions were complicit in their own demise. Consider the experience of the United Auto Workers, once the very model of a strong, powerful union. Its membership in Michigan is down to around 380,000, roughly where it was after it organized General Motors in the 1930s.

Its response to the challenges posed in the 1970s by Japanese imports and in the 1980s by rising oil prices was to collaborate with the head-in-the-sand response by the Big Three automakers. They continued to build cars Americans didn’t want to buy, and the unions continued to negotiate unsustainable contracts.

It would have taken some awfully trusting, farsighted and charismatic leaders, on both the union and management sides, to negotiate those shoals. No one wants to think the good times won’t go on forever, but when the auto industry all but collapsed in 2008-2009, Michigan had some of the highest unemployment rates in the nation.

Things got so bad that right-to-work looked like a good idea. It’s not, and the hope here is that Michigan’s experiment will be short-lived. Even Missouri, which has chased nearly every other goofy “business-friendly” rainbow in the book, has realized that right-to-work ultimately would leave the state poorer.

The way to respond to right-to-work laws is not to whine, but to organize. In that regard, we note columnist David Nicklaus’ report in Sunday’s Post-Dispatch that three St. Louis unions, and the contractor groups they work for, have committed $37 million for training schools, betting on the future.

The sheet metal workers, pipe-fitters and painters unions realize that the future belongs to those who are prepared, and that there’s no substitute for high-quality, well-trained workers. Michigan could learn a thing or two.