Right to Freeload

So-called Right to Work legislation passed the legislature today.  Bills from the House and Senate cleared in tight margins, and each need one more vote next week.

States with Right to Work laws, bastions of economic progress like Mississippi and Alabama, tend to have lower wages, less robust health care coverage, and higher unemployment.  They have an increase in workplace injury.  A decrease in education and living standards.

Somehow, Right to Work is part of Michigan's reinvention, from a Governor who stated he was against it (but is now obviously for it).

No, Right to Work doesn't break-up a union.  It doesn't make them "illegal."  But it does undo them; worker by worker, benefit by benefit they can no longer afford to fight for, it erodes unions.  Right to Work becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy; all you have to do is erode a union and then point to how ineffective unions are.

At the risk of melodrama:

I fought and bled and generations of Marines died for my right to call myself a Marine.  Being a Marine  is not only something I had to earn with toil, but you have to keep earning it, beyond death.  I know what it is to earn something with blood.

Generations ago, workers who tried to organize were arrested, shot, beaten and killed.  Unions exist now on blood shed then.  Unions and the protections they grant were earned in blood.

When someone wants to take something away or diminish something that is earned in blood, it's a disgrace.  It's an insult.  It's a willful slight to the sacrifices of the past.

And for what?

Please someone say "the unions are their own worse enemy."  You can earn that statement with blood...