C4SS anti-“RTW” blogathon

C4SS, to its credit, has taken a stand against the barrage of anti-labor legislation in Michigan with a barrage of posts attacking so-called “right to work:”

• What’s Wrong with Right-to-Work by Gary Chartier
• “Right to Work”: Violation of Free Contract and Free Ride for Scabs by Kevin Carson
• Michigan “Right to Work” and the Folly of Bourgeois Democracy by David Hummels
• We Can’t Tweak Our Way to Freedom by Thomas L. Knapp
• Does “Right to Work” Approximate a “Free Market?” by Kevin Carson

I’m disappointed that the framing of the issue is almost entirely contractarian. This opens the door to the “freedom of association” defense of excuse for employment discrimination, and has the further effect opening the door to the claim that a union-organized worplace “discriminates against people who aren’t union members.” This may be true with craft unions, but craft unionists, like libertarians, are right wing tools who think they’re better than other people. With real unions, industrial unions, union membership, in the too-few workplaces where it is present, is merely a condition of employment, just as intrusive background checks, piss tests, etc., are conditions of employment in too many places. To invoke a disparaging cliché popular with libertarians and other conservatives: “Nobody’s holding a gun to your head. You can always get a job somewhere else.” When snotty “I got mine” types with right-wing viewpoints such as libertarianism/conservatism say “you can always get a job elsewhere” they talk as if jobs are easy to find. In my invocation above of this tired mantra, at least there is half-truth to the “You can always get a job…” BS, in that non-union jobs, while not easy to get, are a hell of a lot easier to get than good union jobs in today’s precaritized post-Reagan economy.

David Hummels, to his credit, not only points out that, as a slogan “right to work” is patently dishonest, but explicitly states why:

Obviously one is not entitled to a job in a ‘Right to Work’ state, so what is the truth behind the PR spin?

This actually gets to the core of what anagorism is all about. It’s about right-to-work in the non-disingenuous sense.