I’m depressed at work and want company. I’ll leave gun violence aside, since while my views are pretty black and white, the people who run our country seem to be, at very best, too chicken shit to even start a conversation. I’ll also save the research I’m doing on wage theft for another day. (I had a guy at a party last night tell me that he has a simple plan for gutting unions that even I would agree with: all we have to do is make laws that guarantee people certain wages, certain number of days off, and access to a certain amount of sick leave. At the time I chalked it up to him being foreign, but the more I read about the myriad ways low-skill (and sometimes high-skill) workers get screwed at every turn, the more I think he’s just an intellectual victim of his own life-long affluence because 1) anyone who’s ever worked for minimum wage knows it’s totally bullshit that that’s the “minimum” anyone would need and 2) minimum wage is already a fucking law and there are still hundreds of thousands of people who fail to earn it.)
I digress. What I actually wanted to write about is “right to work.” Obviously my home state has been on the front lines of this clusterfuck of “debate.” (Sure, we can debate whether or not workers have rights, but not whether or not people should be allowed to carry fucking guns in fucking schools.) I digress again. We were up in Lansing protesting this week, which was as fun as it was ultimately fruitless. But it was nice because it was a way to participate in a political process that has become more and more oligarchic at every turn. Yeah, that election euphoria didn’t last long.
I also wanted to give any of my friends who are unclear of what “right to work” really is some talking points in case they’re ever at a party where some fucknut is telling you that the best way to get rid of unions is to pull unicorns out of your ass. I wrote one of these posts for work, but my boss ended up rewriting it because she’s trying to single handedly pull off an epic epistemological shift in which “right to work” becomes “union insecurity.” I admire the effort (“right to work” is a pretty damn catchy bit of branding) though I worry that we’ll lose some people by changing the name without telling anyone. So here’s what right to work/union insecurity is in a nutshell:
If you work in a unionized shop in a non-right to work state, you have two options: you can either join the union and pay dues or you can decline membership and pay a fee to cover the services that the union provides for you even though you are not a member, including 1) negotiating your contract 2) filing grievances on your behalf 3) lobbying for safer working conditions 4) fighting to keep your pension checks coming etc. In right to work states, however, you get a third option, which is to pay nothing. You still get the benefits of the union (ie you can still insist they file a grievance on your behalf—at their expense), you just don’t have to contribute anything to make that happen. As more people realize they don’t have to pay anything to get the good stuff, fewer people do, which hobbles the unions which makes the contracts shittier, which WAS THE POINT IN THE FIRST PLACE. This is how it works. Seriously, tell your friends, because I’ve been amazed at how many ridiculously over-educated people are unaware of this.
And that, dear friends, concludes my bad news week.
