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Introduction
Human Rights Day, December 10, is supposed to be a day to celebrate human rights. But in 2012 Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and his fellow Republicans spent the day attacking them in Michigan and betraying the state's proud tradition of organized labor.
On December 10, 2012, Michigan's Republicans succeeded in passing "right-to-work" legislation, effectively gutting the human right to form and join unions to protect workers' interests, as provided in section 23.4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This passage of right-to-work in Michigan is another blow to the labor movement, whose ranks have been under attack for so many years that the unionized percentage of the workforce is lower today than it was in 1916. Unions and workers should be responding to this fact with a sense of urgency. This article will provide a short history of the right-to-work provision in the National Labor Relations Act, explain what it does, discuss prior challenges, and offer several arguments as to why these laws must be considered illegal. Hopefully these arguments will be useful in the fightback against them.
The original National Labor Relations Act of 1935
The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 (the Wagner Act) unreservedly supported unionization and promoted the benefits of collective bargaining as the policy of the United States. Section 1 of the law declared:
The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract, and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of wage rates and working conditions within and between industries.
Experience has proved that protection by law of the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively safeguards commerce from injury, impairment and interruption, and promotes the flow of commerce by removing certain recognized sources of industrial strife and unrest, by encouraging practices fundamental to the friendly adjustment of industrial disputes arising out of differences as to wages, hours, or other working conditions, and by restoring equality of bargaining power between employers and employees....
It...