Michigan unions looking for ways around Right to Work

Illinoisans should keep an eye on Michigan, where a new Right-to-Work law has now gone into effect.

Paul Kersey
Director of Labor Policy

Illinoisans should keep an eye on Michigan, where a new Right-to-Work law has now gone into effect. The state’s powerful unions have yet to settle on a strategy for dealing with the new law, which eliminates agency fees and gives workers a choice whether or not to join a union and pay dues.  As we noted before, some unions have opted to negotiate new contracts just before Right to Work took effect in the end of March, locking in forced dues for a few more years. Right to Work does not apply to union contracts that were in place before the law’s effective date.  Eventually, all current contracts will need to be replaced or extended, at which point all workers will have the option to join or withhold support from a union.  (The only exception will be police officers and firefighters, whose unions are exempted from the Right-to-Work law.)

But the strategy of negotiating deals that extend dues collection is null and void now that Right to Work is in full swing. Some unions are hoping to have the law invalidated by the courts, but that approach is unlikely to pay off in the long run.

The unions could attempt to take their case directly to the public, either through a citizen’s initiative or by proposing a constitutional amendment. This is an option that is under consideration among union officials, but up to now the unions haven’t committed to it.

If they did, there’s a good chance that would ultimately fail, too. Polling done by Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research showed that many Michiganders have confidence that Right to Work will pay off: 42.7 percent of those surveyed said that the law would help the state’s economy. A slightly smaller number, 41 percent, said the law would be hurtful. The remainder believed that the law would have no effect.

It should be noted that the pollsters reached out to adults, not registered or likely voters. Historically, polls of “adults” tend to lean more to the left than polls of likely voters, giving Right-to-Work backers some reason to suspect that their support would be even better in an actual election. The poll shows that in a public vote over Right to Work, the law’s defenders would have a large base of support to build on and unions would have relatively few persuadable voters they could win over. While the unions would have a sizeable base of their own and large resources from mandatory union dues collected in the past, success would be far from guaranteed. This might explain why union officials have so far been reluctant to commit to a repeal campaign.

Right to Work is very likely to be permanent in states close to Illinois. This is an issue that Illinoisans will likely need to deal with in the not-too-distant future.