I have worked most of my career as a carpenter. If you live in Teays Valley or the Kanawha Valley, you may live in a home I helped to build, or you may drive across a bridge I worked on or you might shop in a store or restaurant I worked on.
I have raised a family here and will retire here. My parents and grandparents as well as my great grandparents and their forbears also lived and worked here.
I mention this only to establish that I am not a paid shill imported for some well funded organization underwritten by incredibly wealthy out-of-state oligarchs with a hidden agenda. I am merely another working class West Virginian. I'm compelled to write due to the onslaught of misinformation and some outright lies that are being published in support of so-called "right-to-work" legislation ramrodded through Legislature.
The first and most important point against right-to-work is that it is not and never has been a worker driven grass-roots movement. It is a political agenda that is being pushed and funded solely by corporations and the wealthiest people in the United States. Its sole purpose is to divide workers in the workplace.
This accomplishes two goals for the oligarchs. Right-to-work weakens existing unions by allowing cheapskates to enjoy the benefits of union membership without providing any support to the union that represents them, and it makes it even more difficult for unrepresented workers to organize their own union, an already overwhelming task to perform.
While the supporters of right-to-work like to frame it as "workplace freedom", in reality it undermines workers' freedom to collectively bargain for wages, benefits, and working conditions by allowing a minority of dissenters to scuttle the will of the majority. It doesn't do anything that is an actual benefit to people who work, unless you consider lower wages with little or no health insurance or a pension plan an improvement.
Another bit of misinformation concerns the spending of union dues on political campaigns. The supporters of right-to-work like to say that union leaders spend members' dues to support politicians who hurt their members.
This is patently false on two points. First, it is a violation of federal law to spend or donate members' dues to political campaigns. The only money that can be used for political purposes is money donated by each individual member of the union, and the union must have the written permission of each of those members to use that money for political purposes. Regular dues funds are off limits for politics.
Don't you think that corporations should have to live by the same rules? Do you think that that any corporation could get the express written permission as well as an out of pocket donation from every single stockholder to spend money on politics?
The bulk of union political activity is that we have volunteers from our membership interview political candidates to find out their position on labor related issues, report that data back to our members and make a recommendation of which of those candidates would likely give workers the best representation. We also ask our members to volunteer to do door to door get-out-the-vote activities, and some volunteer to help specific candidates by erecting signs or helping with other campaign needs.
Another dubious point being tossed out is that union membership increased in the state of Indiana after passage of right-to-work. While it is a fact that union membership increased slightly in Indiana recently, there is little evidence that it was brought about by right-to-work. In fact, economists have stated that it is too soon to tell whether right-to-work has had any effect at all on union membership or the economy in Indiana or Michigan, but it should be noted that in Michigan both union membership and the state's economy worsened instead of improving.
Yet another questionable claim by the right-to-work supporters is that the law will improve union representation. They claim that unions no longer represent their members fairly and that right-to-work will force labor unions to make themselves more marketable. All labor unions are regulated under federal labor laws, and are strictly limited on spending dues and what constitutes legal activities, and the same federal law gives the members of any union a means to decertify their union as their bargaining agent. Should union members request a decertification of their union, every member has the opportunity to vote whether to continue with membership in an election under the auspices of the National Labor Relations Board. As far as holding individual union officials accountable, I honestly can't think of any more effective way for accountability to be enforced than through the election process. Virtually every union official faces re-election at regular intervals. If the membership finds an official to be ineffective or unresponsive or failing to represent them, that official will likely be voted out of office, and replaced by leaders who will be more responsive to the needs of the members. Right-to-work can't possibly improve on that.
Right-to-work supporters also claim that the law doesn't alter collective bargaining, but that is also untrue. Right-to-work negatively affects collective bargaining and representation in two ways. First, it promotes division among the workers by inviting some to not pay their fair share of the costs of representation while requiring the union to represent those who are not dues paying members as equals to those who pay their dues. It also weakens the unions' ability to represent the members by reducing their dues collections. If the unions' funds are reduced enough, then it is rendered ineffective. Right-to-work is simply another way that the big money interests want to use to divide and conquer all of us who get up and go to work for our paycheck. Other than labor unions, there are no organizations that fight every day to protect our standard of living and our interests. Whether you are a member of a labor union or not, right-to-work will lower your wages, reduce your benefits, and lower your standard of living. It will not create new jobs, it will not reopen coal mines, and it will not bring new business to West Virginia.
The supporters of right-to-work have an agenda that is not in the interests of working men and women. In truth, they want to weaken the bargaining ability of every working person by inflicting damage on labor unions.
Another fact that those who would undermine our ability earn fair wages prefer to not discuss is that with only 10.2 percent of workers in West Virginia represented by a union, how can they characterize union membership as compulsory? If you don't want to be in a union, could you not apply for one of the 90.8 percent of jobs that do not have union representation? If a member is unhappy with their union and none of the remedies available to them will rectify the issue, why not just go to work somewhere else where there is no union representation?
Clearly right-to-work does not give workers any real rights that they do not already have. Like the medicine shows in turn-of-the-century America, they are selling us snake oil that will ultimately harm us. We must not trade our economic future for a patent medicine that won't work.
Paul L. Shaffer II, a lifelong resident of Cross Lanes, is a member of Carpenters Local 1207 in Charleston.