Labor: The Other Rights Battle

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Though the civil rights battle gets most of the attention, another rights battle is also being fought across the U.S. It concerns something called the right-to-work law—a legal guarantee that a worker need not join or pay dues to a union to hold his job. Already on the books in 20 states, right-to-work laws will be an election issue in four more states before 1964 is out, and another four states are on the brink of putting the issue on their ballots. Right-to-work laws have received the endorsement of the nation's most liberal management association, the prestigious, nongovernmental Committee for Economic Development—but the opposition is still strong. Last week, after a bitter struggle, Oklahoma voters turned down a right-to-work proposal by a narrow margin.

Despite the setback in Oklahoma, right-to-work proposals stand a good chance of becoming law before year's end in Idaho and Montana, both of which border on states with similar laws. They will also come up in Vermont, but the Northeast has a tradition of cold-shouldering such measures. Strong right-to-work movements are underway in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon and Kentucky, and in New Mexico right-to-work forces are trying to elect state legislators who favor their cause in order to pass a rights law next year.

Since the enactment of the first right-to-work law in Florida in 1944, the movement has been hotly debated in virtually every state, but has been really successful only in the Plains, Southwestern and Southeastern states, where the laws have been passed mainly to lure industries from union-dominated Northern states. Opponents, led by the chiefs of organized labor, have countered the lure argument with a statistic that again proved to be forceful in last week's Oklahoma election: the states with right-to-work laws have an annual per capita income of $379 less than the national average. One of the reasons advanced by labor: unions in those states, among the poorer states to begin with, have lost an important part of their power.