How Right to Work Is Destroying the American Labor Movement: From the Ku Klux Klan to the Tea Party

This essay examines recent efforts to enact right to work laws and analyzes the impact of such laws on union development. The argument is that right to work is an invidious anomaly in federal collective bargaining policy, and Section 14(b) should be eliminated from the National Labor Relations Act. Proponents of right to work legislation claim that such laws promote economic development, but the evidence for that claim is unconvincing. Alternatively, supporters of the legislation assert that it promotes individual liberties in our market economy. Opponents of right to work challenge the normative dimension of right to work as an empty ideology that cannot withstand critical scrutiny. Right to work is inimical to the economic and social interests of American workers.