Right-to-work trades off with union climate action

The law effectively established a states-rights framework for labor law, forbade industry-wide collective bargaining, and cut off several avenues for unions to engage in politics. It further required union officials to sign a pledge that they were not members of the Communist Party. With the NLRA neutered, states south of the Mason Dixon line would become testing grounds for right-to-work rules. They were the brainchild of the Houston oil lobbyist Vance Muse, who described the benefits he saw in such statutes bluntly: “From now on, white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.” “These laws were designed in the 1940s to stoke tensions between white workers and Black workers,” Carter explained. “The subtext was right to work without integration.”

That carbon-intensive industries like coal, steel, and electricity were so central to the U.S. economy and such prime targets for labor actions made it especially important for industry and politicians to keep them running profitably and without disruption, by any means necessary. As recently as the 1970s, miners engaged in militant, multiracial battles against their bosses. That the same workers are now seen as the centerpiece of Trumpist white identity politics—and a cudgel against climate policy—is both a historical novelty and the product of a decades-long fight to drive unions and solidarity alike out of the industries that keep the country running.

Today, a new generation of Southern Democrats in Virginia have been wary of repealing its right-to-work law. Governor Ralph Northam and several other Democrats refused to back the repeal effort when it was first raised in 2019, when the Republican Party controlled Richmond. One common pushback Carter got then was that Republican delegates would exploit the opportunity to kill right to work in a floor vote. Now they say it threatens to make the state less welcoming to big business. “When it comes to repealing right to work,” Carter said, “there’s been no functional difference between Republicans in control and Democrats in control.”

There may be cause for optimism at the national level, though. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act—which passed out of the House last February, and which Biden has voiced support for—would preempt the core of statewide right-to-work measures. In addition to a host of other workplace protections, the legislation would allow employers and unions to agree on a “fair share” clause, so that workers can pay the agency fees toward the cost of bargaining and administering collective bargaining agreements. It protects workers’ First Amendment rights, as well, like their ability to engage in the “secondary boycotts”—protesting nonunion shops, for instance—that Taft-Hartley outlawed. The PRO Act, of course, will face the same anti-democratic hurdles that threaten most progressive legislation in the Senate.

If passed, it may help build the power necessary to win green policies: A 2018 study by political scientists James Feigenbaum, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, and Vanessa Williamson compared counties on either side of state borders—one in a state that had enacted right-to-work laws and one that hadn’t. “After the passage of RTW laws, county-level Democratic vote shares in presidential elections fall by 3.5 percentage points relative to bordering counties without RTW laws in place,” they found. “Presidential-level turnout is also 2 to 3 percentage points lower” in right-to-work counties, and such laws “generally reduce Democratic vote share and turnout in U.S. Senate and House elections, as well as state Gubernatorial races. Democratic seat shares in state legislatures also fall after the passage of RTW laws.”

For climate activists, there is ample cause to want strong unions besides needing more Democrats to pass climate legislation. The war mobilization is a frequent reference point for Green New Deal advocates. Even the Biden administration appeals to the nostalgia of a booming manufacturing economy in describing plans to produce American-made electric vehicles, for instance. The automakers who might carry that out, though, have moved many of their operations South over the last several decades, in search of weaker labor laws and cheaper wages—or out of the country entirely.

If booming electric car production were the tip of the spear of a green recovery—and there are myriad reasons to be wary of that—much of that production could well happen in nonunion plants that are hardly delivering the sort of midcentury imaginary that talk of a wartime production evokes. The country’s most high-profile electric car manufacturer, Tesla, is run by an anti-union zealot who has already violated the National Labor Relations Act. “A lot of people lament the loss of manufacturing jobs, but the truth is you can have a good union job in any industry as long as you unionize it,” Carter said. “By repealing right to work, we’re setting conditions that make it easier for organized labor to come together and form unions and demand the kind of wages” and working conditions associated with those jobs.

Taking the Green New Deal’s namesake seriously would mean not just big spending programs and curbing corporate power but proactively building electoral coalitions that can endure through the years of work that decarbonization will entail. Climate politics have often been felled by industry talking points pitting working people against environmentalists supposedly asking them to give up their livelihoods. That argument is most often made in bad faith.

Even more progressive climate policy plans, though, can make unions sound like one item on a long laundry list of good things it would be nice to have in an energy transition. In right-to-work states, especially, unionized fossil fuel work—at power plants and refineries, for instance—is frequently one of the only steady sources of well-paid jobs. Organizing for the PRO Act and right-to-work repeal could be a way for greens to show concrete solidarity with labor in the near term, building the kind of power needed to make any massive green jobs program a reality. Importantly, unions organizing the many unorganized workers in low-carbon sectors—from energy efficiency to rooftop solar—could swell their ranks and institutional power, which can bear dividends on everything from democratic reforms to labor protections to climate measures.