You may have heard the phrase “right to work,” as in, “Iowa is a right-to-work state.”
But what does right-to-work mean, and how does that government policy impact you as a worker?
“I think most of our members don’t exactly know,” said Charlie Wishman, president of the Iowa Federation of Labor AFL-CIO. “A lot of people get at-will employment [where an employer can fire you for any non-discriminatory reason] confused with right-to-work.”
Unions, which organize collectively to increase worker power, have always been a threat to the ones who have the power currently—the bosses, CEOs, shareholders, etc. And those bosses got pretty worried when Congress passed the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, part of the worker-friendly New Deal.
With increasing worker power on the rise, in 1947, corporate types managed to get Congress to pass (and then override a presidential veto of) the Taft-Hartley amendments to the Act, which allowed states to prohibit unions from requiring a worker to pay dues.
But there was intense opposition across the country to such laws including in Iowa, according to Wishman. He cited information from the IFL’s “A History of the Labor Movement in the United States,” written by David Colman and published in 2000.
Approximately 100,000 Iowa workers went on a one-day general strike on April 22, 1947, to protest Taft-Hartley. Around 50,000 of them attended a rally at the State Capitol in Des Moines to protest the state’s proposed...
Budget figures show 1.765 million permanent migrants will arrive in Australia over the next three years. Our verdict False. The budget doesn't forecast permanent migration, and other migration for...