Right To Work - For Lower Pay And Benefits

Republicandirtytricks.com's take on "YOU HATE 'RIGHT TO WORK' LAWS MORE THAN YOU KNOW. HERE'S WHY," by Mark Ames at Not Safe For Work Corporation (http://nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/right-to-work):

"Meet Vance Muse, the racist political operative and Texas lobbyist who pioneered the 'right to work' movement that’s still assaulting Americans to this day.

"Muse, like all Republican operatives, appealed to the worst aspects of the human condition (racism) to 'divide and conquer' the working class... and, like all Republicans, besides being a greed-centered ghoul contributing nothing but pain to society, Muse, who lobbied against women's suffrage, FOR child labor laws and against the against the 8-hour workday, was always on the wrong side of history.

"The 'right-to-work' movement to destroy labor unions began almost as soon as FDR passed the Wagner Act in the mid-1930s, which gave labor organizers 'union security' as the old euphemism went and should still go. Again, you have to understand the historical context: Until the Wagner Act passed, when it came to workers’ rights, America in the 1930s was about half a century or more behind the rest of the West — child labor wasn’t even outlawed here until 1938."

"...and Republican fascists want to drag us back to the Gilded Age. We must educate our fellows, STOP the Class War against working people and re-instate the Wagner Act.

"From now on, 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."
— Vance Muse, founder of the "right to work" anti-labor campaign

"The Michigan GOP apparently blindsided everyone with the union-busting 'right to work' laws they just rammed through the state. Certainly my labor friends were caught off-guard tactically by the Republicans’ speed and choice of battleground.

"For most of the county, though, the confusion has to do with what 'right to work laws' are and why they’re so bad. You can see it written on the faces of the morning cable news hosts on CNN and even MSNBC — trying to pretend like they know what "right-to-work" laws actually mean, flummoxed by the brazen Orwellian neologism of the phrase and sweating over the possibility that they might have to explain it. Lucky for them, and for most of the media establishment (and for the Koch brothers), few people even know what questions to ask about 'right to work laws.' All they know — kinda — is that they’re bad for unions, and that those unions seem to know exactly how bad things are about to get.
"So yesterday, as Michigan Republicans pushed the bill into law, labor groups converged on the capital in Lansing. According to the BBC, 'police in riot gear used tear gas to control tensions among a crowd [outside the Michigan statehouse] of more than 10,000 protesters.' For a lot of (once)-middle-class Americans, it’s hard to reconcile that level of anger with something as dull-sounding as 'right to work laws.'

"'Austerity measures' are easier to fear: 'austerity' is meant to sound scary and sadomasochistic. But 'right to work' sounds dreary and almost redundant, like 'right to pay bills.'

"That’s until you start to understand the history of the 'right to work' movement, the racist human hagfish who brought 'right to work' into our lexicon and made it happen, and the far-right fascist oligarchs who made it worth their while.
In terms of understanding what just happened, it would help if we were back in the 1940s and 50s, when most liberals and establishment media used — and understood — the antonym, "union security" — a descriptive phrase for the New Deal labor laws which finally gave union organizers a fighting chance, and saw the percentage of unionized workers in the US soar from single digits in the early 1930s to around 35% of the workforce by the mid-late 1940s.



The "right-to-work" movement to destroy labor unions began almost as soon as FDR passed the Wagner Act in the mid-1930s, which gave labor organizers "union security" as the old euphemism went and should still go. Again, you have to understand the historical context: Until the Wagner Act passed, when it came to workers’ rights, America in the 1930s was about half a century or more behind the rest of the West — child labor wasn’t even outlawed here until 1938.

But nothing compared to the endless massacres and murders of American labor organizers, massacres that are all but censored from the official history of this country. Maybe you’ve heard something about the Ludlow Massacre of the families of mine workers at Rockefeller’s mines in Colorado in 1913 — but you probably don’t know many of the details, like how Rockefeller’s private armed goons patrolled the miners’ miserable tent cities in an armored car with a mounted machine gun, spraying the tents and terrorizing the strikers, who demanded such radical concessions as "enforcement of Colorado’s laws," the eight hour work week, and pay for time spent working. Or how the terrorized women and children in the embattled tent city dug a giant makeshift bunker pit beneath one of the larger tents to hide out from the bullets — only to have Colorado National Guardsmen douse the tents with kerosene and light them on fire while the miners’ families were sleeping, then shoot some of those who ran out, killing over a dozen children, scores of workers and their wives, and ending with the arrests of hundreds of miners.

In the end, anywhere from several dozen to 200 were left dead. We don’t know exactly — and there hasn’t been much effort on the part of our culture to find out. This "we don’t know the death toll" marks just about all of the many killings and massacres of labor organizers and strikers in the pre-New Deal era.