March 7, 2011 NILRR News Clips
Labor leaders call LePage ‘factually very uninformed’
Bangor Daily News Online
2/28/2011
“Right to work” laws are on the books in 22 states, and legislation is pending in about a dozen more, including Maine, according to Patrick Semmens, spokesman for National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
Semmens acknowledged that workers are not forced to join unions. But Semmens said employees often are told by union officials that membership is mandatory or are not told they can withdraw later without penalty.
But the bigger question, according to Semmens, is how meaningful “resigning” or withdrawing from a union is when the worker must continue to pay dues, is bound by the terms of the union contract and is prohibited from negotiating his own contract with an employer.
LePage: Wisconsin protests will come to Maine ‘once they start reading our budget’
Lewiston Sun-Journal Online
2/28/2011
Patrick Semmens, with The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, said that federal courts have reaffirmed a worker’s right to leave a union. However, he said, those decisions have not meant that a worker’s freedom of association rights are fully protected.
“In fact employees are still forced to accept union ‘representation,'” Semmens wrote in an e-mail, adding that workers can’t negotiate their own contract.
Pros, cons of worker rights laws
UnionLeader.com
3/06/2011
Unions and their supporters argue that the right-to-work bill is the product of an anti-union campaign led by the National Right to Work Committee, based in Virginia.
Fiscal worries, union power-grabs spark new Right-to-Work campaigns
Washington Examiner Online
3/05/2011
The logic of state Right-to-Work laws is ironclad: Not only is safeguarding worker freedom the right thing to do, it also yields tremendous economic benefits. Recent studies from the Cato Institute and the National Institute for Labor Relations Research suggest that Right-to-Work states enjoy higher job growth and more cost-of-living-adjusted disposable income for workers than their forced-unionism counterparts.
What isn’t new is Americans’ support for Right-to-Work. For decades, polls have shown that the public overwhelmingly agrees with the principle that union membership and dues payment should be voluntary, not forced. A recent poll even demonstrated that 80 percent of union members agree with the Right-to-Work principle, the same amount as the public at large.
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