Here Comes Right to Work!
By 
The building trades’ romance with Donald Trump is sure to pay off since he will only totally sign any right to leech bill that comes across his desk.
On Wednesday, Republican Reps. Steve King (IA) and Joe Wilson (SC) re-introduced a so-called right-to-work bill that would significantly hamper unions across the country and likely lower wages for all Americans.
Republicans have proposed this kind of legislation before; King introduced a similar bill almost exactly a year ago. But now they may feel emboldened by having an ally in the White House. On the campaign trail, President Trump said he is “100 percent” in favor of right-to-work laws.
No American can be forced to join a union or pay dues that are used for political purposes. But right-to-work laws go further: they repeal the requirement that all employees in a unionized workplace must pay dues to the union, given that it bargains on behalf of all workers — and, therefore, the benefits of those negotiations flow to everyone. Without that requirement in place, critics of these laws argue, they create a free rider problem: Employees can refuse to pay dues while still reaping the benefits of higher wages or more generous benefits negotiated by the union — including having the union take up a grievance on their behalf, which can be costly.
That can significantly hobble unions’ finances, given that they still have to do the same work as before but with less money, making it more difficult for them to operate and organize more workers.
So far, 27 states have gone right-to-work. And in those states, workers are much less likely to be in a union: Those in non-right-to-work states are about two-and-a-half times more likely to be in one or protected by a union contract.
Research has found that this has a serious impact on everyone’s wages, even those not in unionized workplaces. According to a paper from the Economic Policy Institute, wages in right-to-work states were 3.1 percent lower as of 2012 than in those without these laws, even when controlling for a variety of factors. That translates into a loss of more than $1,500 a year for an individual full-time worker.
Unfortunately, for huge sections of the white working class, their interests as whites are more prominent and meaningful than their interests as workers. But at least we don’t have the candidate of Goldman Sachs in the White House! Meanwhile, Missouri became the 28th right to leech state just yesterday. The only thing standing in the way of national right to leech is the Senate filibuster. And you probably feel more confident about the future of that than I do.