Eliminating Right to Work: How Bolstering Union Participation Serves Racial Equity and Reparative Justice

Introduction

There are two types of policy approaches we can use in order to work towards racial equity and reparative racial justice. The first is to dismantle systems of white supremacy by repealing policies and abolishing systems that have created discriminatory racial outcomes. The second is to craft and introduce new policy measures that emphasize reparative racial justice. By using a mixed approach; both dismantling systems of white supremacy and administering measures of reparative justice, can we make genuine, good-faith attempts to restore communities of color injured by white supremacy. 

One area of policy that has created disparate and discriminatory impacts on people of color is labor policy. In particular, the adoption of Right to Work (RTW) laws in the United States has led to a decline in union participation which has negatively and disproportionately impacted black workers economically. In this policy paper, I will discuss the racist history of Right to Work laws, the impact of these policies on people of color,  ideas of education as a preferable salve compared to labor reforms, racial outcomes of RTW states vs non-RTW states, and ending with policy initiatives that could assist in creating a more racially just society. 

Historical Context

Right to Work laws emerged in response to the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935. The NLRA guaranteed workers the right to organize and collectively bargain over wages, benefits, and working hours. Elites within white supremacist movements feared that black people joining unions would lead to solidarity between working whites and working blacks and weaken segregation in the workplace. This fear led to the political right to develop  RTW legislation to combat potential racial mixing within the workplace (Colangelo, n.d.).

RTW laws are misleading in the name. Prolabor branding obfuscates the central idea of the law. That being, in an RTW state, workers are not required to pay union dues (Legal Information Institute, n.d.). This makes it more difficult for labor organizations to sustain themselves financially. The result has been lower union membership. While RTW laws appear race-neutral, they have an origin that is explicitly white supremacist in nature. The progenitors of right-to-work laws, William Ruggles and Vance Muse, were chiefly concerned with keeping the workplace segregated and leaned heavily on white supremacist politics and far-right ideologies in arguing for RTW  laws. The overtly racist nature of Right to Work laws is best illustrated by examining Vance Muse as a central figure. 

In 1941, Vance Muse began working towards the passage of Right to Work policies. Muse was the editor of The Christian American and was an important figure in the organization The Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution (SCUC). Muse was a self-described anti-semite and white supremacist who used his positions within The Christian American and the SCUC to sowe anti-black racism and to rally white southerners to the cause of defeating FDR’s reelection campaign. Muse’s plea for states to take up RTW policy ideas was rooted in racism and white supremacy both explicitly and implicitly. A SCUC leaflet circulated by Muse stated, "President Roosevelt has … permitted Negroes to come to the White House banquet table and sleep in the White House beds." When discussing New Deal labor policies, "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." (Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, n.d.). His efforts were aimed at maintaining racial segregation and exploiting the labor of African Americans and other minority workers. He viewed union integration as a genuine threat to the Jim Crow racial hierarchy and sought to defend white spaces of employment and the ‘white habitus’ from having to share economic privileges with blacks. Muse would die in 1950, but not before seeing the fruits of his political efforts. 

The passage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 amended the NLRA of 1935 and marked the beginning of the Right to Work legislation being passed in various states. Taft-Hartley made it illegal for unions to compel members to pay dues. Taft-Hartley ultimately banned closed-shop unions which, by making it illegal for a job to require union membership, created a free rider problem for union organization’s ability to self-finance with member dues. Membership rates steeply declined in states that adopted Right to Work legislation. A study performed by Ellwood and Fine (1987) found that RTW laws resulted in a “strong short-run reduction in union organizing…” This eventually led to a reduction in the “flow” of workers into unions. The subsequent reduction in personnel and the inability to finance activities on declining dues payments led to the systemic decline of union membership in the long run (Dasgupta & Merchant, 2023). In the late 1940s, black workers were more likely to be members of a union than white workers (Faber, Herbst, Kuziemko, & Naidu, 2021). This association between union work and black people was precisely the reason why Vance Muse and his colleagues were so invested in the passage of RTW laws across the country. Muse and his fellow white supremacists anticipated that lower union participation and by extension decreased access to union benefits would harm black people in the U.S. This is not to say that unions themselves were some sort of safe haven for black workers and barring entry to these organizations would satisfy Muse’s white supremacy. Existing bigotry and racism within unions themselves have presented challenges to legitimate inclusion in spite of empirically bolstering the economic stability of black workers. (Wilson & Darity, 2022)

The economic harms of RTW laws are well documented. We can clearly associate the decline in union participation with increases in the income gap. Because black workers were more likely to be involved in union work, they were disproportionately affected by this widening of the income gap as a result of declining union membership. The U.S. Department of the Treasury states that union membership “peaked in the 1950s… At that time, despite pervasive racial and gender discrimination, overall income inequality was close to its lowest level since its peak before the Great Depression and was continuing to fall. Over subsequent decades, union membership steadily declined, while income inequality began to steadily rise after a trough in the 1970s.” (Feiveson, 2023) 

The Civil Rights Era of the 1960s and 70s made substantive progress towards winning black people more power economically, socially, and politically. Specifically, ensuring that black people had access to good jobs with good pay and good benefits was a high priority. Martin Luther King’s Poor People's Campaign identified good employment for blacks as a key initiative in the fight against poverty. MLK was clear-eyed in his identification of RTW laws as both implicitly and explicitly racist. In a speech to the AFL-CIO he states, “... we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as "right to work." It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone.” (U.S. Department of Labor, 2024)

Issues of employment were and continue to be highly salient for people of color in the U.S. In response to racial civil unrest across the country in 1967, the Kerner Commission was formed. In 1968 they presented their findings. Unilaterally, the Kerner Commission found that the root causes were related to unemployment and underemployment in the black community along with highly visible discriminatory policing practices and poor housing conditions. The report also found that blacks were twice as likely to be unemployed and three times as likely to be in unskilled jobs. Blacks earned 70% of whites and were twice as likely to live in poverty. Blacks were three times as likely to live in overcrowded and substandard housing. The Kerner Report concluded that “What white Americans have never fully understood but what the negro can never forget is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintained it, and white society condones it.” (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968) In subsequent instances of unrest, such as the 1992 LA riots, discrimination in employment practices and lack of job opportunities were cited as one of the root causes of the violence and social unrest. To Rebuild is Not Enough, the report that emerged after 1992, stated findings that echoed the Kerner Commission Report (California State Assembly Special Committee on the Los Angeles Crisis, 1992).

Clearly, the saliency of well-paying jobs under good working conditions has persisted at the forefront of the minds of racially marginalized groups. We will now discuss a prominent response to the issue of the racial gaps in income, wealth, and unemployment/underemployment. Specifically, we will explore how an emphasis was and often continues to be put on getting black students into four-year universities and efforts to increase education in the black community to combat poverty. All people deserve to be given a robust education and should benefit from the tools and opportunities that education offers. However, the increased focus on using education as a remedy for racially divided outcomes between whites and blacks in the U.S. has not led to increased racially equitable outcomes. Instead, we see the trademark characteristics of predatory inclusion when we shift focus away from the tangible benefits of union membership to education. 

Criticisms of Repealing RTW Laws and Education as a Response to Black Unemployment

Critiques of repealing Right to Work laws often shift focus to education and particularly the idea of ‘school choice’, private schools, college preparedness, and higher education as remedies for the employment conditions of people of color. Presenting education as a silver bullet for BIPOC employment has created an environment of predatory inclusion. For-profit schools targeting communities of color have emerged, promising routes to higher education and job opportunities (Student Borrower Protection Center, n.d.). However, these private for-profit schools and programs have mostly left families and students trapped in debt with little to no positive impact. As is often the case, allowing people of color access to systems of education designed to benefit white people does not, in fact, mean they are treated the same and receive the same privileges as whites.

Furthermore, blacks experience disproportionately higher rates of unemployment compared with whites with identical education levels. The Economic Policy Institute reports that, regardless of education level, the black unemployment rate is more than twice the white unemployment rate. Additionally, the EPI states that this unfortunate paradigm is nothing new. This extreme contrast between white employment and black employment, controlling for education level, has always existed (Wilson & Darity, 2022). 

Disparities in employment are further exacerbated by disparities in pay. Black women, on average, earn 70% of what white men are paid for the same jobs. By contrast, white women are still underpaid compared to white men at 83% of pay for the same work. Controlling for gender we can see that race remains a significant dimension in the pay gap between white and black workers in the U.S. (Kochhar, 2023).

The wealth gap is also increasing between whites and blacks.  The U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee (JEC) states that “education alone is insufficient” in closing the racial wealth gap. “ Even as Black college graduation rates have increased, the net worth of Black college graduates in their 30s has dropped by $42,000 or 84 percent over the last three decades.”  (U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, 2021)

As long as racial discrimination still exists within labor practices, financial systems, and educational systems, black people and people of color will never be able to fully capture the advantages of access to these systems. In order to make access to these systems equitable as opposed to predatory, we need to begin by repealing white supremacist Right to Work laws across the country and introducing reparative policies that address discrimination in education, finance, and labor. 

Repealing RTW Laws and Advantages Experienced by Unionized Workers of Color 

In states without RTW laws, union participation rates are higher, and with greater union membership comes phenomenal benefits to racially marginalized groups. Non-RTW states with higher union membership have a smaller pay gap between whites and blacks. Non-RTW states have less of a wealth gap between white and black families. “Among nonunion families, the median white family has more than $7 in wealth for every $1 held by the median Black family. Among union families, this ratio is roughly half as large, with the median white family holding $3.70 in wealth for every $1 held by the median Black family.” Unions also reduce racial resentment among white workers and promote acceptance of policies designed to benefit households of color  (McNicholas & Poydock, 2021).

Repealing Right to Work laws from the books would be an enormous feat in dismantling a key manifestation of white supremacy in the realm of labor and employment. Elimination of these destructive laws would boost union participation which would subsequently afford workers of color a greater voice, increase pay, win better benefits, augment working conditions, and help to enliven systems of organization for people of color that can exhibit robust antifragile resistance to systems of white supremacy in the U.S. We can pair the removal of RTW laws with reparative measures designed to actively fight discrimination in employment, finance, and education. 

Reparative Solutions to Augment Racial Equity and Justice

In order to administer reparative justice for the damage caused by RTW laws we need to introduce policies that will combat the ill effects amortized by communities of color. Implementing living wage laws and guaranteed annual incomes would go a long way towards improving the quality of life for the working class and low-income people who are disproportionately people of color. Additionally, cracking down on wage theft which disproportionately hurts black workers and workers of color would help abate the pay gap (Wilson, 2021).

Offering free tuition at public colleges and universities and ending student debt profiteering would help to reverse the damage done by predatory inclusion in systems of education. Further, canceling debts to provide relief from debilitating household, student, and consumer debt used to extract wealth from people of color would be a step in the right direction in redressing the harms done by a racially unjust financial system. Debt cancellation must be performed in conjunction with systemic reforms that prevent predatory financial behaviors by institutional lenders from continuing to manifest (Tress, 2024).

Conclusion 

Ultimately, achieving racial equity and reparative justice necessitates a twin approach that dismantles the entrenched systems of white supremacy while simultaneously implementing new policies designed to address historical injustices. History reveals that Right to Work laws were imagined and implemented in order to explicitly and implicitly serve the interests of white supremacy at the expense of racially marginalized groups. In attempting to redress the damages of RTW laws we must be careful to avoid the pitfalls of predatory inclusion. To truly rectify the harms inflicted by decades of systemic racism in labor practices, we must introduce reparative policies that tangibly counteract systems of white supremacy in active and legacy forms. Bolstering unions by repealing RTW laws, enacting living wage laws, ensuring access to higher education without financial burden, and protecting workers from exploitation are just the start. By addressing both systemic failures and implementing reparative policy, we can forge a path toward a more equitable future.