If Bush Did It

Not so long ago, the Great Satan to the labor movement was Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker — who faces a union-led recall election later this year. This week, if perhaps temporarily, that title is being claimed by Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels whose signature Wednesday made Indiana the only right-to-work state in the upper Midwest and one of only two such states in the entire northeast quarter of the nation. (See right-to-work state map here .) Labor unions would like you to think that right-to-work laws outlaw unions. But what they actually do is say that a person can’t be compelled to be a union member or pay union dues in order to hold a job. In other words, right-to-work laws increase the economic liberty of all Americans while threatening the funding sources for union bosses in states where workers are held captive to big labor. This of course threatens Democrats whose life blood is that same union money. Indiana is the 23rd right-to-work state and the first state to adopt a right-to-work law since Oklahoma, which took that step in September, 2001. The industrial, labor-dominated states of the Midwest’s “Rust Belt” such as Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio have for years been losing jobs (and population) to the South, where there are legal protections of workers’ and employers’ freedom. Indiana is aiming to become a Midwest alternative to those southern states. Republican Indiana Senate President Pro Tempore David Long, quoted in the Indianapolis Star , described an Indiana company which was going to move to Alabama but is now staying put, as well as saying that “a company from Michigan was planning to go to a ‘right to work’ state in the South. When they saw what was happening here, (they) invited the state to bid. . . . We are now in consideration for those jobs.” If Indiana can show that its new law is a magnet for jobs, it may turn out to be the first domino to fall across a part of the nation which has been rapidly losing manufacturing jobs while Democrats’ desire to protect union coffers has trumped their desire to promote their citizens’ prosperity. Although less discussed than Indiana’s move, Virginia also struck a blow for public finance rationality and to protect that state’s right-to-work law. With the state’s lieutenant governor casting a tie-breaking vote in the state senate, the legislature passed a bill that

Originally posted here:
Labor Pains