The Indiana House approved a ‘right to work’ bill late Tuesday, taking the state a giant step closer to ruling out mandatory dues for workers at union workplaces. Indiana would be the first ‘right to work’ state in the upper Midwest.
By Mark Guarino, Staff writer
Indiana is poised to become the first state in the upper Midwest to follow the lead of Southern “right to work” states, taking a big step Tuesday to bar unions from requiring nonunion workers to pay membership dues for representation in bargaining.
The Republican-led Indiana House approved the controversial measure, 55 to 44, late Tuesday, after almost a year of dramatic standoffs between the political parties. The state Senate has already passed an identical bill, and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) is expected to sign it.
State GOP leaders say the so-called right-to-work legislation is essential to turn around Indiana’s struggling economy and to make the state a more desirable destination for businesses. “We are one stop closer to bringing more jobs to Hoosiers,” said House Speaker Brian Bosma, in a statement.
Democrats framed the bill’s passage as a political maneuver by Republicans to weaken union strength in the state.
“The only places where today’s events will be cheered is in the boardrooms of big businesses and corporations across this state,” said the top House Democrat, Patrick Bauer, in a statement Tuesday. “The House Republicans just helped increase the profit margins for these companies at the expense of their workers.”
Union dues have long been a target of Republican lawmakers, who say those dues are often used to further a Democratic agenda and to elect Democrats to office. The right-to-work legislation hits unions right in their pocketbooks, reducing their ability to wield clout in elections and during negotiations over labor contracts.
Once the bill becomes law, Indiana will be the 23rd right-to-work state – and the first in 10 years to take this path. Right-to-work laws are in effect mostly in the South and the West, where unions are least active and where “anti-union ideology is predominant,” says law professor Ann Hodges at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Attacking union coffers traditionally benefits Republicans, Ms. Hodges says, because of the ongoing political ties between unions and the Democratic Party.
“Reducing unions’ resources reduces their ability to provide political support and influence public policy” introduced by Democrats, she says.
Unions already have precarious standing in Indiana. Union membership there has dwindled during the past 20 years, dropping 42 percent between 1990 and 2010. It fell below 300,000 in 2010, resulting in a state workforce that is 10.9 percent union, lower than the national average of 11.9 percent.
With union membership already in free-fall, the GOP victory Tuesday is largely “symbolic,” says Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “It just shows unions have declining political power.”
Unions might have been wiser to spend less energy in Indiana and to have redirected their efforts and resources to states such as Wisconsin or Michigan, where unions are stronger and have more political clout, he says.
It’s unlikely that right-to-work laws will now cascade through the rest of the Midwest, says Mr. Chaison. But events in Indiana may result in “right to work” becoming a theme in the 2012 presidential race, endorsed by GOP hopefuls Newt Gringrich, a former US House speaker, and Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor.
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This is Mitch Daniels at work. I wish he’d apply for higher office.
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