The Right to Work, and the Right at Work

Abstract

Antiunion right to work (RTW) laws are a distinctive legacy of (trans)formative struggles around the industrial-relations settlement in the United States, and an enduring symbol of its stunted and bifurcated development. The RTW fault line, drawn in the 1940s and 1950s, was for a long time the sharpest spatial indicator of the divide between the union staging grounds of the industrial heartland and the much less organized and characteristically ‘deregulated’ South. After 1958, something like a cold war stalemate prevailed for half a century, however, with only an incremental drift to the RTW side, even as a new pattern of ‘flexible’ growth was incubated in the Sun Belt, as deindustrialization and trade displacement struck the Rust Belt, and as the political climate, post-Reagan, skewed decisively in favor of corporate interests. Nevertheless, the RTW line essentially held, that is, until the abrupt renewal of hostilities after 2008, following a Republican resurgence at the state and local level, coupled with a concerted, cross-country attack on a weakened labor movement led by an ideologically aligned coalition of business organizations, free-market think tanks, legal activists, and heavily bankrolled conservative advocacy networks. The former union strongholds of Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin have since gone RTW; practically every non-RTW state in the nation has witnessed the advance of this signature antiunion legislation; and a new generation of local RTW ordinances has been hatched. This article explores the implications of this sudden movement in the tectonic plates of the U.S. labor-relations system and the labor geographies that are being made (and broken) in its wake.