Last week, we saw once again how President Donald Trump’s actions are not living up to the promises he made to the working families he vowed to stand up for during his campaign.
His press secretary, Sean Spicer, said Trump “believes in right to work. He wants to give workers and companies the flexibility to do what’s in the best interests of job creators.”
The scam known as “right to work” is really about diminishing the accountability of employers to their labor force. Right-to-work laws undermine occupational health and safety and silence the voices of workers who belong to unions, among other things.
Right to work is wrong for working families. The facts don’t lie:
- Workers in right-to-work states make $6,109 less per year than workers in other states
- The median household income in right-to-work states is $8,174 less than in other states
- People under 65 years of age in right-to-work states are more likely to lack health insurance
- The rate of workplace deaths in right-to-work states is 49 percent higher than in other states.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “right to work” a “false slogan.” He said, “In our glorious fight for our civil rights, we must be on our guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right-to-work.’ This high-sounding label does not mean what it says. It is a dishonest twisting of words with the aim of making a vicious law sound like a good law.”
“Right-to-work” laws do not give anyone the right to work. The name is an intentional misnomer. It seeks to silence the voices of workers who stand together through their unions. It targets workers’ ability to negotiate together for better wages and benefits and safer working conditions.
Intentionally or not, Spicer put it correctly when he said that right to work is “in the best interests of job creators,” meaning corporations. He didn’t mention workers. The reason it’s in the best interests of corporations is not because it will help them create more jobs but because it will give them more power to reduce wages, downgrade benefits, eliminate jobs and ignore their workforce.