Right to work just means fewer rights for workers

Without unions, employees would be in a far more difficult position dealing with business

I was deeply disturbed by your right-to-work section in the Feb. 11 Sunday Journal. The inches of column space and the cartoon unfortunately point to the Journal’s bias, not your openness.

Let me fill you in on some facts about right-to-work laws. Rightto-work laws are not the idea of working women and men. They are not about worker freedom or fear of losing First Amendment rights. The pedigree of your contributors makes this abundantly clear: Right-to-work laws are written by and for business owners. This has been true in state after state.

Secondly, right-to-work laws do tend to boost the number of businesses in a given state, and lower wages and reduce benefits. How much lower can New Mexico go? By lowering wages and reducing benefits, right-to-work laws are throwing more hard-working people onto public resources for food, health care and shelter. Essentially, right-towork laws tax the resources of a state and its people to increase profits.

Finally, the real reason for rightto-work laws has always been to reduce the power of unions. That is it. (The authors of the columns on) your Sunday op-ed page would love unions to be underfunded, rare and ineffective. They wrap themselves in the mantle of the Constitution to portray themselves as good citizens protecting us all from union overreach. Even the name ‘right to work’ is intentionally misleading: this is not about the right to get a job, or have rights enforced on the job, just the opposite.

Let me tell you why I am a union leader. My union represents more than 2,000 public employees. Most are part time. Because of union pressure, most have health care within their reach. All have sick leave and personal leave. All are entitled to a grievance procedure if they feel they are being treated unfairly. If they face legal trouble connected with their employment, the union can help.

All these benefits are for the people who teach the residents of Central New Mexico. It is not a lot. We cannot strike, by state law. We do not have paid maternity or family leave. We do not have childcare. We have not received a raise in years. Right now our real wages are below 2008 levels. I would like to improve conditions for these working people. I do not think the management perspective is the worker’s perspective. I am here to stand up for that.

I am a union leader because my family worked in coal mines for three generations. I saw neighbors lying on the porch wheezing the life out of themselves with black lung, which is preventable. It was the unions who ultimately forced the coal companies to be accountable and to take the necessary precautions.

I am a union leader because I worked in day labor here in New Mexico, showing up at 5 a.m. ready to do whatever was available. Mostly sitting on my hands or driving across town to work three or four hours and being told that was all. The folks I worked with were able and ready to work: it was not the union which kept them from employment. This is the right to work which your contributors envision.

Let’s go way beyond the notion that right to work is good for workers, or that it represents your rights and freedoms. It is, pure and simply, less rights at work. And that is not what New Mexico needs.