...We have just completed a long and costly negotiation that increased our pay to nearly $20 an hour. In the other tracks in New England, the pay ranges from $12 and hour to about $16 an hour. Most other tracks have either non-union shops or in-house associations with no affiliation to an international Union or the AFL-CIO. We are a closed shop and affiliated with both the IBEW and the AFL-CIO. Under our law here in Massachusetts you have to pay union dues to work at a "union shop" and be a member of the union. However, if you put your request in writing with the employer, you can opt-out of the union by paying an agency fee, which amounts to about 80% of the union members' dues. You still are represented by the union, you remain on the seniority list in your rightful place, you bid for jobs in accordance with the contract and you enjoy the wages and benefits that the union negotiates with the company. What you give up is participating in union meetings or voting in union elections or voting on the contract itself.

(snip)
Union Dues money can never, ever be used for political donations of any kind. No one is coerced to pay into this (PAC) fund and any member can bring any union or union official up on charges before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) even if he or she thinks this law has been violated.

What right to work laws do, is allow the employee to enjoy all the benefits I have outline here as a non-union member, but that employee doesn't even have to pay an agency fee. Pretty soon, the union is defending that individual, or itself, if that individual wants to put forward "nuisance charges" against the union. (snip) Fewer people pay dues, the union has less resources but the same amount of responsibility, and the union ends up in a "death spiral".

What if you could enjoy all the security of being a US citizen. Our country was protected from invaders, our children still had to be educated, our roads were built, etc. Yet, if you decided to, you could opt-out of paying taxes. Sure, some folks would continue to pay taxes. But the same type of person who would opt-out of paying union dues would opt-out of paying taxes. Pretty soon, the rest of us feel like idiots, and there would be no federal, state or local treasury. And as a result, there would end up being no country. That's the closest analogy I can make to this outrage of forcing unions to provide services to employees for free, while they enjoy all the benefits that we provide.

Supporters of such laws - largely Republicans and business interests, including the Koch brothers - say workers should have the right not to pay union dues if they don't want to. (They also call the laws "freedom to work" legislation.) In addition, they say that right-to-work laws are good for business. Economist Thomas Holmes in 2000 found that growth in manufacturing in counties near the border in right-to-work states was 26 percentage points greater than non-right-to-work states - a finding trumpeted by right-to-work supporters.

Critics - largely Democrats and unions - say the laws are designed to weaken unions. If employees are not required to pay union dues, they point out, unions are likely to shrink and labor will have less leverage to engage in collective bargaining. That results, they say, in lower wages and worse working conditions. Opponents of the law also say it's no surprise that businesses are drawn to states with anti-union policies, as well as looser regulation and lower taxes, but that doesn't prove such policies are good for the economy - and workers shouldn't have to suffer in a race-to-the-bottom battle between states to appeal to businesses.

Americans For Prosperity, founded by billionaire tea party titans David and Charles Koch, is heralding Michigan's imminent passage of right-to-work legislation laws in Michigan as "the shot heard around the world" in the fight to weaken unions.

But the group was also a significant financial backer of Proposal 5, an effort to amend the Michigan Constitution to bar tax increases without a two-thirds legislative supermajority.
(snip)

The answer may lie in another Koch-funded group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which promotes a radical right-wing agenda in states across the country, supplying "model legislation" to sympathetic lawmakers.

The organization boasts more than 2,000 legislative members. It also has corporate members, who weigh in on the model legislation before it's approved by the group's public-sector committee, the group's national chairman said in an interview he gave after dozens of pieces of ALEC-written model legislation were leaked last year in a joint project by The Nation and the Center for Media and Democracy.

The purpose to regiment labor for the Nazi Party was avowed by Ley in a speech to workers on 2 May 1933, as follows:

"You may say what else do you want, you have the absolute power. True we have the power, but we do not have the whole people, we do not have you workers 100%, and it is you whom we want; we will not let you be until you stand with us in complete, genuine acknowledgment."

The first Nazi attack was upon the two larger unions. On April 21, 1933 an order not even in the name of the Government, but of the Nazi Party was issued by the conspirator Robert Ley as "Chief of Staff of the political organization of the NSDAP," applicable to the Trade Union Confederation and the Independent Employees Confederation. It directed seizure of their properties and arrest of their principal leaders. The party order directed party organs which we here denounce as criminal associations, the SA and SS "to be employed for the occupation of the trade union properties, and for the taking into custody of personalities who come into question." And it directed the taking into "protective custody" of all chairmen and district secretaries of such unions and branch directors of the labor bank.