This past December, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and the state's legislature made national headlines by passing historic "right-to-work" legislation that ended more than 75 years of forced unionism in our state. Since 1935, when the "Wagner Act" was passed requiring employers to negotiate with unions, organized labor has held tremendous power in Michigan.
While the unions that were formed in the 20th century accomplished many beneficial things for workers, they quickly became too powerful, and did some things that were counterproductive to commerce and job creation, including calling numerous long and disruptive strikes. That caused Congress to act again and pass labor reforms, including the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (also known as the "Taft Hartley Act"), which amended the Wagner Act and put some reasonable limits on organized labor's power to control workers and disrupt commerce.
One of the reforms of the Taft Hartley Act was to give individual states the power to pass "right-to-work" laws. Along with other benefits, right-to-work laws allow states to ban "union security clauses" that force workers to join a union as a condition of employment. But since union bosses had already established such political power in the industrialized states by the time Taft-Hartley was passed, right-to-work laws were initially only enacted in southern and western states, where unions had not yet established political control.
But after decades of union domination in the industrialized states, workers have begun to realize that the gains that unions made in the 1930s and 1940s have long since been adopted into federal law, and unions have become, to some extent, an impediment to business growth, expansion and job creation.
As union bosses have demanded unreasonably higher pay and more costly benefits from companies, more and more manufacturing plants were forced to "relocate" to more "business friendly" right-to-work states to remain competitive. Case-in-point: In 1979 there were 1.5 million UAW represented jobs, primarily right here in the Midwest. Today there are fewer than 400,000.
Why? One of the main reasons is that as union bosses won more costly pay and benefit packages for blue collar workers, companies found it increasingly difficult to compete in a global marketplace and understandably began moving their operations out of heavily unionized states to more business-friendly right-to-work states. I would submit that these high union-negotiated labor costs were a primary reason that GM, Chrysler and Delphi were forced to reorganize under Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
And there is another downside to unchecked union power. Just look at what 60 years of union control has done to Michigan municipalities like Detroit, Flint and Pontiac. Not only have unsustainably high union pay and benefit packages caused "private" companies to flee the state, and drained the economic lifeblood from these communities, but union control of "public" sector workers has left these communities saddled with bloated, inefficient municipal workforces that have refused to cut jobs or streamline public services in line with their shrinking populations and reduced revenue. In Detroit, union bosses and the Democrat party have developed an "incestuous relationship" that has left Detroit in tatters and on the verge of declaring Chapter 9 Bankruptcy.
But Gov. Snyder's reinvention of Michigan has brought not only labor freedom and liberty to individual workers in unionized workplaces, but the beginning of an economic turnaround for the entire state. Since Gov. Snyder was elected, Michigan has led the nation in creation of manufacturing jobs with more than 88,000. Indiana, another state that recently passed right-to-work legislation, ranks third with more than 53,000 manufacturing jobs created in the past three years. It's undeniable, despite what the union bosses will tell you: Freedom-to-work laws attract businesses and help create jobs.
Brian Pannebecker is a Michigan Freedom-to-Work spokesman.