The Real Agenda of “Right to Work”

It is time to go to war, not only on Rick Snyder and Republicans in Michigan, but also on their real masters – the DuVosses and Koch Brothers. And I don’t mean just political war. They need to feel the pain that they are directing at working families in Michigan. This “lame duck” session was not just a sleazy betrayal of Snyder’s campaign promises to us, or a political payback from Republicans for supporting the Constitutional Proposition enshrining collective bargaining rights [is the need for that Proposition to pass obvious enough now?].

The so-called “Right to Work” is an economic policy by the Plutocracy to destroy unions by defunding them. In the short run, defunding the unions accomplishes an obvious political goal. In the wake of Citizens United, the only significant factor to offset the hundreds of millions of dollars corporations use to buy their political candidates are the unions. By defunding the unions, there will be no financial force to represent the needs of the middle-class and working families.

The “Right to Work” has been called the right to work for less, and rightly so. In virtually every State that has passed this legislation, wages have decreased for every worker. The data on job production is mixed, with some States gaining jobs and others not gaining any additional jobs, but the bottom line is this: working families will need more jobs because they will no longer have an opportunity for a living wage. Corporations will turn this Country into a third world Country in terms of wages. Then they will not have to ship jobs overseas to pay slave wages.

The union movement was born in violence, with men and women literally sacrificing their lives to help others. Let’s hope and pray that the movement doesn’t suffer a passive fate.