Posted on 03/08/2018 4:19:32 AM PST by reaganaut1
Next week’s special congressional election in southwestern Pennsylvania will test whether, deep in Trump country, union support can help elect a Democrat running on a middle-class economic agenda. A victory would remind Democrats of the electoral power of organized labor. Even though it has relied on unions’ electoral muscle for nearly a century, the party has often failed to shore up labor’s diminishing strength. Our research demonstrates what an enormous electoral mistake that has been.
Political analysts have long argued that dwindling union power would be bad for Democrats. The conservative strategist Grover Norquist, for instance, has speculated that the decline of labor in recent years could mean that Republicans (and President Trump) may continue to win big despite Mr. Trump’s unpopularity. But there were not reliable estimates of the size of that effect on elections.
We have quantified the electoral effects of one kind of anti-union law, commonly called “right to work” legislation. Those bills allow workers to opt out of paying fees to a union at their workplace — even if those workers benefit from union bargaining and protections. The results are ugly for Democrats and for the working class.
We looked at how right-to-work laws shaped elections from 1980 through 2016. We compared pairs of counties, one in a state that passed a right-to-work law and the other just across the border in a state that didn’t. Even if right-to-work and non-right-to-work states are quite different, bordering counties in many states tend to have similar economic, demographic and political trends. Our approach, which isolates the changes that show up only when right-to-work laws are passed, holds up even when we account for other state-level legislation passed at the same time as right-to-work bills, including voter ID laws and other common pieces of conservative legislation.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Typical liberalism: Compel people to pay against their will for the sake do the Democrat Party and its allies.
Study the history of the struggle for Right to Work in Missouri to see how far unions will go to prevent it. They are desperate.
Unfortunately the teachers’ unions are still in place - and they directly transfer our earnings to the Democratic Party (which in turn transfers our earnings to the teachers’ unions)...
That's called WINNING.
When Tammy Faye Bakker died she was at the mortuary and they removed her makeup. Do you know what they found? Jimmy Hoffa.
Setting up the excuse for losing next week already; I like it!!
agreed - gov’t unions need to be outlawed. Calvin Coolidge was right
It really is a great scheme; everywhere you have a public school, you have a parasitic union draining taxpayer resources and sending them back to the “queen parasite” (the Dem Party)...which in turn raises the required contributions (taxes) from the same taxpayers.
That headline makes me smile!
As he often was. He is my second-favorite U.S. president behind George Washington.
<>”Right-to-Work Laws Have Devastated Unions — and Democrats”<>
Right to Work laws are breaking up the Democrat extortion scheme.
I don’t object to a union collecting money from its members to fund its activities.
What I do object to is a union coercing its members to fund a political party/candidates they disagree with.
Workers have the right to collective bargaining and representation in the workplace. But unions have no right to abuse them to fund a favored political viewpoint.
And ending the latter practice would cripple the reach of the Democratic Party around the country. Its not an accident every Red state has a right to work law.
“Right-to-Work Laws Have Devastated Unions — and Democrats”
Then they’re doing what they were intended to do.
If unions really are a good thing for their members, then they shouldn't worry about "right to work" and people having a choice to join or not. If they're such a great deal, people will want to join. The fact that unions fight so hard against "right to work" tells me they have something to fear from people having a choice. Workers should have the freedom and liberty to join, or not.
>
Unfortunately the teachers’ unions are still in place - and they directly transfer our earnings to the Democratic Party (which in turn transfers our earnings to the teachers’ unions)...
>
Easy fix, but neither side is willing. Want to see the Leftist hypocrisy, just coax it as ‘getting $$$ out of politics’ and watch ‘em squirm:
- No entity may donate time, material, labor, property that cannot vote in said election. Each infraction will be fined 100x the (estimated) value thereof, or a minimum of $1M\per, adjusted for inflation to all parties involved.
Done.
No more outside of county for county runs, State for State level, etc. ONLY funded by the electorate.
I agree - but as you point out, neither side is willing.
Mission accomplished. We just need those laws nationwide.
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