Michigan became one of the few states to repeal the right to work law.
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on Friday, Michigan repeated an 11-year-old law that weakened the power of unions in the workplace. Known as “right to work” law, this type of legislation has existed since at least 1943and Michigan is now one of the few states to ever renovate it.
When Michigan passed legislation in 2012, the state was in Republican hands. The party controlled the governor’s office, the state Senate, and the House of Representatives after coming to power on a tea party wave. Conversely, this repeal comes just a few short months after the Democratic Party, long allied with unions, scored its own trio for the first time in about four decades. Meanwhile, in 2022 the unions reached their highest popularity since 1965. However, in the abolition of the right to work, party membership can play no less a role than love for trade unions.
Because each unionized worker receives their own benefits, private sector unions are often allowed to charge fees from these employees whether or not they join the union. But 1947 Taft-Hartley law allowed the states to enact laws—the so-called “right to work laws”—that put an end to this practice, and a number of states actually passed them.
The main effect of the laws is to weaken unions in the states where they are enacted. Because workers can enjoy the benefits of unionization without paying for it, this creates a classic the economic problem of the “free rider”. Why pay union dues when you still get benefits? As a result, unions often have fewer resources to organize and negotiate.
many states passed their right-to-work laws in 1947, just after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, and they tended to be southeastern, southwestern, and/or predominantly agricultural states. The laws also played on racism, anti-Semitism and anti-communist sentiment in these states. according to Michael Pierce report, historian at the University of Arkansas. Pierce details how Vance Mewes, a pioneer of right-to-work laws and head of the American Christian Association, described the laws as a way to prevent strikes and empower police to support Jim Crow and repress blacks.
In the 2010s, as Republicans gained power in statehouses across the country, there was a renewed effort to enact right-to-work laws in new states and organizations such as the American Council of Legislative Exchanges. presented model legislation. Since 2012, similar laws have been passed in Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Kentucky, while the right to work has been adopted in Alabama and Tennessee. constitutional amendmentswhich makes it difficult to flip them. Prior to Michigan’s repeal, 27 states had right-to-work laws, constitutional amendments, or both.
Similarly, in 2018 the Supreme Court ruled that public sector employees The collective agreement was not supposed to pay union dues. The ruling, combined with state right-to-work laws, has created a difficult legal environment for unions and weakened their power, said Sharon Block, executive director of Harvard University’s Center for Labor and Fair Economics. “I think it affected the numbers, but it also affected the resources,” she said.
This became clear when the new laws came into force. Unlike the South, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana were relatively heavily unionized. But someresearchshowedWhat Union densities in most of these states have declined since the passage of the right-to-work laws compared to other similar states, even after the Great Recession. There is also some evidence that such laws reduced wages another Employee Benefits in the states that adopted them.
Supporters of right-to-work laws have long believed that reducing the power of unions in the state will attract employers and lead to more jobs, and that the benefits of additional employment pull people out of poverty another Increase job satisfaction. “There are well-known stories of southern states especially saying, ‘Well, we’ll give you a bunch of subsidies to support your investments, and we’ll also make sure there are no unions,’” Thomas Lemieux said. economist at the University of British Columbia who has studied the recent wave of right-to-work laws. However, studies show that this is not led to higher wages or enhanced worker protection in those states. A common criticism of many of the studies showing the benefits of right-to-work laws is that they fail to control all other factors that can lead to economic growth and employment growth. “It’s certainly fair to have a debate about what the costs and benefits of unionization are,” Lemieux said.
Lemieux said jobs created tend not to include the benefits that union jobs bring because workers have little bargaining power. In states like Michigan, Income differentiation increased as union density declined; this seems to be due to the fact that the presence of trade unions tends to reduce the number of households by top and bottom of the income scale. The presence of unions can also signal support and provide organization around other public policies that benefit workers, said David Kemper, senior public policy coordinator at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-wing think tank that supports unions. In general, the right to work scored lower on a number of questions, from wages to workplace safety and political participation, according to a report from the Illinois Economic Policy Institute. and the Middle Class Renewal Project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Maybe That’s Why Michigan Democrats Moved Quickly to Repeal the State Right to Work Law: Weakened Unions less able To support democratic candidates, which helps explain why Republicans favor anti-union laws while Democrats in Michigan seek to repeal them. In Illinois, the legislature also recently passed Workers’ Rights Amendment to the state constitution, preventing future right-to-work laws. And these changes involve future union protection in states where Democrats gain control of state government.
“I think success is contagious, success can breed success and give employees the confidence to resist the trends of the last few decades,” Block said.
FIX (March 24, 5:05 PM): The previous version of the chart in this story did not include the 1957 Indiana Right to Work Act and its repeal in 1965. The chart has been updated.
Or, as Haley put it during the 2020 Republican National Convention, “America is not a racist country. This is personal for me. I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. They came to America and settled in a small southern town. My father wore a turban. My mother wore a sari. I was a brown girl in a black and white world. We have faced discrimination and deprivation. But my parents never succumbed to resentment and hatred.”
My black parents never succumbed to resentment or hatred. Most blacks don’t, despite what our families have endured for generations. I wouldn’t stand a chance of success if they gave up or if I gave up. And yet I feel like Hayley is masterful in telling her story in a way that downplays and dismisses people like me who refuse to play the anger we feel. sometimes it seems that the obvious racism around us is not justified.
i know the strength Hailey’s stories, knowing the pain she talks about what happened to her father when she was a little girl. Her father committed a mortal sin in the south of the Bible Belt: buying groceries at a fruit stand, being swarthy and wearing a turban. He was a Sikh, the turban was part of his faith. Someone called the cops who stood guard while he bought his stuff. Hailey has told the story in many different ways over the years, including in her memoir. And that’s the incident Haley exploited when she pushed lawmakers to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House grounds in 2015 when she had done nothing before to remove it.
“I remember how bad it was,” Hailey said of the fruit stand incident. “And my dad walked up to the checkout, shook hands with them, said thank you, paid for his stuff and didn’t say a word as he walked home. I knew what had just happened. That grocery store is still there, and every time I drive past it, I still feel that pain. I realized that this Confederate flag was the same pain as many people.”
Hailey’s father had to swallow their fanaticism and even thank them for it by handing over his hard-earned dollars to them. This is what was expected when white people demanded stoic submission. In the same era, my father had to calmly endure insults even from white children who insulted him, knowing that their skin color would protect them.
I know that such incidents leave an indelible mark on your psyche, in your soul. You will never outgrow this, especially if, like Hailey, you and your family have faced racial and religious discrimination in so many ways. Her parents, immigrants from India, were initially unable to find accommodation in Bamberg due to the laws and social norms of Jim Crow. Hayley was expelled from the Little Miss Bamberg beauty pageant at the age of 5 because the insidious racial system left no room for people like her who were neither white nor black. She wanted to be a pilgrim in the school play, but had to portray Pocahontas instead. (“Did they realize I wasn’t such an Indian?” she later said.)
She survived racism as an adult when she fought to become the first woman of color and person to become governor of South Carolina in 2010. State Senator Jake Knotts, a Republican like Haley but an ally of one of her opponents, called her a “dumbass.” (He applied the term to then-President Barack Obama as well.) The Lexington County GOP denounced him and ordered him to resign. Instead, he issued a half-hearted apology “for the unintentional insult” but stated that Haley was “pretending to be someone she’s not like Obama did.”
Growing up in the circumstances that Hayley and I lived in, you learn pretty early on that you have to make a certain amount of compromises and sacrifices in order to succeed in the eyes of white people. You can cry in private, but show a hard upper lip in public. It could mean swallowing hard, as Hailey’s parents and my parents did to accommodate the white people in your orbit. And sometimes it meant inadvertently buying into their illusions, or having common sense and good Southern manners “God bless your heart” so as not to bust their myths. We were taught by history teachers in our public schools from books written by apologists and descendants of the Confederacy. We learned that the enslaved people were happy and that the enslavers treated them like family members, and that the Confederate flag was “a symbol of respect, honesty and duty” and “a way to honor the ancestors who came to the service of their state“. Those were Hayley’s words. But she also said the opposite, reminding viewers that the flag was also perceived by some as “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally repressive past“.
In an interview with the Palmetto Patriots during her first run for governor in 2010, Haley defended the states’ right to secede and said the Confederate flag was not racist and its placement was “a compromise of all people that everyone must accept“. She was referring to the General Assembly’s decision in 2000, under pressure from a boycott by the NAACP, to remove the flag from the roof of the State Building and place it in front of the building. As part of the “compromise”, the legislature also initiated plans for a monument to African Americans to be erected in the State Capitol and established the official administration of Dr. Jr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s public holiday coincides with Confederate Memorial Day. This “compromise” was the key to racial progress in South Carolina. In exchange for the privilege of moving the traitor flag while still flying on Capitol grounds, black citizens had to agree to a public holiday commemorating the traitors who wanted us to be enslaved forever.
At the same time, Haley made history by nominating Tim Scott to the US Senate, making him the first black from the Deep South to serve in that chamber since Reconstruction. And she signed into law a law that began to correct years of inequalities that had plagued school districts like the ones she and I attended.
Through a spokesman for Fox News, Mr. Mishkin said he “spoke on election night” when he said Fox expected Mr. Biden to win the remaining votes. If Mr. Mishkin had indeed misspoke, there was still no indication that the Fox team expected Mr. Trump to garner the remaining votes by a significant margin, let alone by an overwhelming majority.
On the air on Election Night, Mr. Mishkin cited two main reasons to expect Mr. Biden to vote well in the remaining time:
“Yes, there are several unfulfilled votes in Arizona. Most of them come from Maricopa, where Biden is currently in a very strong position. And a lot of it is mail-in voting, and we know from our Fox News voter analysis that Biden has the edge.”
At first glance, these arguments were not outlandish. Mr. Biden won in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and the majority of Arizona’s voters. He also won the mail-in vote in Arizona.
In the end, Mr. Trump received 59 percent of the remaining votes, nearly negating Mr. Biden’s lead.
What did Fox miss?
How could a group of mostly mail-order ballots and mostly Maricopa defeat Trump by such a wide margin?
While mail-in voting seems monolithic, there can be important differences between mail-in ballots counted before and after an election. This is because in Arizona, mail-in ballots are counted roughly in the order they were received, and different voters return their ballots at different times.
In the run-up to the election, it was clear that the Democrats turned in their ballots earlier than the Republicans. As a result, mail-in ballots counted on election night — those received at least a few days before the election — are likely to reject Biden by a wide margin.
The flip side: Voters who received mail-in ballots but had not yet returned them were very Republican. If they end up getting their ballots back, those so-called “late” mail-in ballots counted after the election will hit Trump hard.
Of course, it wasn’t inevitable that Mr. Trump would win those ballots by as wide a margin as he ended up (although Republican voters may have been influenced by Mr. Trump’s repeated campaign claims of cheating to deposit his ballot late). . It is possible that many of these Republicans will simply vote on Election Day. For example, in last November’s midterm elections, the Republicans failed to win decisively in a “late” mail-in ballot under fairly similar circumstances.
President Biden’s nominee for FAA chief Philip A. Washington declined to consider the nomination, the White House said.
Abdullah Hasan, a White House spokesman, said Mr. Washington has the qualifications and experience to lead the FAA, despite a long and ultimately successful effort by Senate Republicans to crush the candidacy.
“Unfortunately, an onslaught of unwarranted Republican attacks on Mr. Washington’s service and experience irresponsibly delayed this process, jeopardized unnecessary procedural obstacles on the Senate floor, and ultimately led to his withdrawal today,” Mr. – Mr. Hasan in a statement to the New York Times.
The move comes shortly after the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee said it would delay a vote on Mr. Washington’s nomination, which was scheduled for Wednesday.
His Senate Republican critics complained about his lack of aviation experience and raised questions about his involvement in the Los Angeles corruption investigation.
Although Mr. Washington, a 24-year Army veteran, has been the chief executive of Denver International Airport since 2021, most of his career has been in ground transportation, leading the Denver Regional Transportation District and then the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
He was involved with a Los Angeles corruption investigation involving non-bidding contracts awarded by the transit system to a non-profit organization that runs a sexual harassment hotline. Last year, the California Attorney General’s Office took over the investigation from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Mr. Washington denied any wrongdoing in this matter.
Pete Buttigieg, US Secretary of Transportation, announced Mr. Washington’s departure on Twitter hours before the White House released its statement.
“The FAA is in need of an approved administrator, and Phil Washington’s transportation and military experience made him an excellent candidate,” Mr. Buttigieg. tweeted on saturday night. “The guerrilla attacks and procedural obstacles he faced are undeserved, but I respect his decision to leave and am grateful for his service.”
The FAA has had no permanent leadership since Stephen Dixon, a former Delta Air Lines executive appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019, stepped down nearly a year ago.
Billy Nolen, the agency’s chief security officer, has been in charge since Mr. Dixon’s departure.
The agency has faced a number of challenges in recent months, including a number of collisions at airports across the country and a system crash in January that caused massive disruptions.
Mr. Washington, 65, would be the first black person to be approved as an FAA administrator. President Biden nominated him for the post in July 2022, but he did not receive a hearing in the most recent Congress. The president resubmitted the candidacy in January.
In a hearing earlier this month, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, the top Republican on the Commerce Committee, said Mr. Washington was simply not the right man for the job. Citing previous FAA executives’ aviation backgrounds, he bombarded Mr. Washington with technical questions related to the Boeing 737 Max crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
