Comment by cool_dude85
10 hours ago
No, it doesn't. There is no such thing as an "open shop" in the US, even under right to freeload. Union membership is determined by job classification. If you are working in a unionized environment, and your job title is a union job title, you are in the union. You will be covered by the contract your union bargains with the employer. The only question, then, is whether you pay the dues to cover the costs of union membership. In a right to freeload state, you can choose not to pay the costs.
You both have it mostly backwards. The Taft-Hartley act mostly bans closed shops and allows states to pass “right to work” laws making payment of any agency fees to unions optional.
In no state are any employees compelled to formally join a union. In an American-style “closed shops” in a non-right-to-work state, if you don’t join the union the bargaining agreement can charge nonmembers an agency fee representing most of the dues they would pay as members. Not to mention pressure tactics to join.
Also especially in the trades in major markets unions control apprenticeship programs and hiring halls and make it virtually impossible for nonmembers to get union work, as well as gatekeeping access to apprenticeship programs in the first place.
Right to freeload laws work as I describe. Although no employees are forced to "join a union" in the sense of signing a piece of paper joining the union, in all cases they are union employees in practice. That is, the union collectively bargains their working conditions, the union supports them via grievance if the employer doesn't follow the contract, and so on. The right to freeload allows for such a person to get by without paying dues - that is, the cost of providing these collective bargaining and legal representation services.
It just struck me how dystopian the phrase "right to work" is. Like, you have the right to go down the coal mine for 16 hours a day and get lung cancer! No right to get paid, though...
“Right to work” is in the context of criminal wage theft laws, OSHA, EPA, Black Lung Benefits Act, Federal Employees Compensation Act, minimum wage (not that this affects mine workers), overtime, etc. Mine work in the USA is one of the most heavily regulated jobs there is and mine workers are very well paid. “No right to get paid” indeed. Mine workers don’t get paid when there is no mine work to do.
Workers must be doubly free.
"For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power. "