‘Right To Work’ roots add insult to injury

Bill Knight column for Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, Oct. 9, 10 or 11

Whether Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner’s attempts on local levels or Missouri Republicans’ stalled effort to become the 28th state with such laws, Right To Work has spread a lot in the 76 years since it was proposed and then pushed by anti-Semitic white-supremacist union busters.

The ill-named Right To Work (RTW) is a policy prohibiting employers from signing contracts requiring workers who benefit from union-negotiated wages, hours and working conditions to share in the costs of bargaining and enforcing contracts. Without RTW, workers where unions achieve contracts either are members or pay discounted “agency fees” or “fair-share” payments. With it, unions’ resources diminish.

Rauner on Sept. 29 encouraged union-busters by vetoing a bill that prevents local governments from establishing RTW zones in their jurisdictions. A 2015 attempt by Lincolnshire to become a RTW village was overturned in federal court, which said federal law says only states can enact such laws (a decision being appealed). So lawmakers passed the measure, which repeats federal law and court precedence, that only states can implement RTW restrictions. Lawmakers could override Rauner's veto in November when they return to Springfield, but it’s unclear whether there are enough votes to succeed.

The idea for RTW laws started in 1941 when Dallas Morning News editorial writer William Ruggles called for a RTW constitutional amendment. He later conferred with the Christian American Association’s Vance Muse, a Texan whose own grandson described him as “a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a Communist-baiter, a man who beat on labor unions not on behalf of working people, as he said, but because he was paid to do so,” remembers Michael Pierce in Labor Notes.

The Christian American Association since 1936 had lobbied against President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal through a blend of racism,  anti-Semitism, anti-Communism, and anti-unionism. The group’s leader, Lewis Valentine Ulrey, blasted the administration and allies, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and NAACP board member Rabbi Stephen Wise, as a “modern Jewish Sanhedrin.” Muse was also offensive, commenting, “That crazy man in the White House will Sovietize America with the federal hand-outs of the Bum Deal – sorry, New Deal. Or is it the Jew Deal?”

The Christian American Association and conservative Southerners targeted organized labor, accusing “Marxist Jews” with manipulating government, singling out Jewish labor leader Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and a founder if the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

“The Association solicited wealthy Southern planters and industrialists for funds to help enact anti-union laws and thus break the ‘stranglehold radical labor has on our government’,” Pierce wrote.

Meanwhile – not unlike today’s American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), funded by the Koch brothers – the Christian American Association drafted anti-strike legislation making workers responsible for picket-line unrest even if scabs, hired thugs or management caused violence. Muse argued that the measure let “peace officers quell disturbances and keep the color line drawn in our social affairs, protect[ing] the Southern Negro from communistic propaganda and influences.”

The Arkansas Farm Bureau supported that law and RTW. Asserting that if RTW failed, “white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes … whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs,” the movement relied on racism. Arkansas’ Farm Bureau Federation said labor was “trying to pit tenant against landlord and black against white,” threatening Jim Crow segregation there.

Arkansas and Florida became the first states to approve RTW.

Despite such roots, mass movements resist RTW, like in Missouri, where petitions with 300,000 signatures halted Right To Work there until voters are permitted to weigh in.

Signed by Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens in February, RTW was scheduled to take effect in August.

Maura Browning, spokeswoman for Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, conceded that “essentially the rule is suspended,” adding that it will remain blocked until a vote, unless the petitions are short of the 100,000 required for a referendum.”

Using “right” in RTW insults Americans’ real rights, especially civil rights