Michigan set to become Right To Work State

[Awsi Dooger]

Unions are a natural by product of a capitalist system. If you're going to engender a society where everything is commoditized, then the worker will eventually see their own skills and labor as a commodity and look for the best leverage points to maximize their wages, or personal profit if you will.

It seems contradictory to me for laizze faire types to bemoan the influence of unions when all unions are doing is using the same strategies as those who employ them... strategies those laizze fair types endorse with a shrug and a "what can you do? It's capitalism."

Like Voter ID laws, which sound great in theory but in practice have a very different goal, the Right to Work movement is really only a tool to break the influence of unions and thus make wages and working conditions worse. I completely understand why businesses want it, but the workers who endorse it strike me mainly as a very scared and weak group of people, mostly without useful skills, who thanks to the direct efforts of their employers have come to see themselves in direct competition with workers in Mexico and China rather than having rights and power of their own. The dynamic is really not unlike a woman who sees herself as so unattractive she'll grovel at the feet of a man who beats her.

Unions have been a great boon to the people of this country and all workers, whether unionized or not, have benefited from their efforts. It's not an accident that the decrease of their influence has coincided exactly with the drop in wages adjusted for inflation.

That's a great post, and particularly the sentence I quoted. I had to laugh at the suggestion in this thread that this move demonstrates strength from the conservative movement, only a month after the election debacle. It's more of the same, scared white guys (SAMs) who have given up on persuading anyone so they desperately try to shift the math. Always in favor of corporations, always targeting demographics who vote Democratic. It's like the GOP sat down and brainstormed more of the same, like the Republican consultant Scott Tranter who conceded on Monday that campaign officials on the Republican side do what it takes to improve their chances, whether it means Voter ID laws or long voting lines. He didn't say it privately to donors or at a think tank, he said it in a PEW forum.


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