What is r/neoliberal's opinion on Right to Work laws?

My perspective on employer-labor relationship is a general policy of less regulation and more redistribution.

1. It should be as easy as possible for a company to fire or hire an employee.

• Exceptions given to discrimination against protected classes, which should be more rigorously enforced. Allow easier access to civil law suits by employees facing employment discrimination, push more of the burden of proof onto employers.

2. Social safety nets, including public healthcare, Negative Income Taxes, universal pre-K, and childcare direct cash credits should have more funding.

• Free trade and complete zoning deregulation to make commodities like food and housing as cheap as humanly possible.

3. Information asymmetry should be eliminated as much as possible. All tax returns should be public information, and companies would have to post the salaries, bonuses, and every form of compensation of all of its employees.

Ultimately, the goal should be to make both the labor market and the hiring market as competitive as humanly possible. Employers would have the freedom to hire and fire whoever they choose, and employees would have enough market information and be so well off, even while unemployed, that they would have sufficient bargaining power to demand better compensation.

Interferes with private contracts. A company should be able to require union membership in their contracts, just as they should be allowed to forbid it. The government shouldn't be dictating who a union is required to represent. They can negotiate on behalf on due paying members, or all workers. The worker can join whatever union best suits him, and work at the company whose policies he prefers.

R2W laws need to be viewed in two respects: the economic argument and their political origin.

Starting with the latter, R2W laws were conceived as a way of undermining political power of unions. Unions, like all concentrated powers around a single issue, are a special interest group that sometimes push for policies that align with greater social welfare and sometimes align with policies that help themselves to the detriment of everyone else. Either way unions will always work in the self-interest of their members (or what they perceive to be their self-interest). As unions have become increasingly aligned with Democrats over the years, working in their own self-interest has largely been a matter of working to elect pro-labor Democrats.

Conservatives have historically been much more willing to reach for power and attempt to disguise their policy moves as being the "economically smart choice". This is very true of R2W. If you dig into the deeper history of R2W in the US, you'll find that it was indeed a cynical power grab. Labor history is fascinating and is worth your time and full of cynical power grabbing from both unions and their opponents. In recent history Chiquita have used paramilitaries in South America to gun down labor organizers. Fascinating and terrifying stuff.

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As for the economic argument, I believe it's more mixed. As someone pointed out in a comment made recently, there are R2W-esque laws in places like Germany, but Germany has much stronger labor unions in general as well as co-determination. The empowering of unions does not go hand in hand with noncompetitive business. Anyone who says otherwise has to explain why Northern Europe, with its very powerful labor laws, has competitive firms.

The clear anti-R2W argument is that in order to address the free rider problem for unions that bargain for the entire company or state contract, the unions need to be able to collect fees. The strongest argument in favor of R2W is that there are problems with freedom of association and public sector unions (though most R2W target private sector unions) may become too powerful without laws to limit them. Public sector unions that are too strong is a legitimate problem, but now every public sector union is R2W because of the Janus v AFSCME decision. I think the case is very hard to make that private sector unions are on average too strong in America, especially today. I can think of several instances where police unions, teachers unions, or firefighters unions that have overreached and caused acute financial distress for their city/county/school district.

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TL;DR As someone who believes Republicans are inept and corrupt I'm wary to undermine public sector unions for political reasons. From an economic perspective it is a mixed bag. R2W is not my preferred method to limit the power of public sector unions but that ship has sailed because of the Janus decision.

I don't have a huge issue with private-sector unions though I think allowing them to utilize legislation to coerce membership is not only bad policy, but antithetical to the idea of liberal republican governance writ large. The assumption made by unionists is that unions necessarily benefit the workers they represent, yet anecdotally we know this doesn't happen frequently enough that it isn't a cast-iron guarantee that unionization in any particular company benefits the affected workers; employees should not be coerced into paying for representatives who fail to represent their interests, particularly outside of the normal political sphere and inside of the workplace.

Public sector unions - particularly police unions - should be treated as organized crime organizations and RICO'd out of existence.

I like what unions are in theory, but don't like what they are in reality in the US.

The challenge with large unions is they are political organizations, with a captive audience of funding. That creates a mismatch of money (lots of it) vs skills required (political) for jobs at the top. So many US unions end up with mafia types running them.

It's not too much different to strip clubs, casinos, etc. Any business or entity that has captive audience of easy money, and is not really an open marketplace, will attract strongmen types to the top to capture that money.

Should workers be forced to contribute money that potentially flows up to crime families? Probably not.

Some of your points seem a bit naive. Like...

The free loading problem might self correct in a similar way to the market: If enough workers decide to free load, the union will start to lose power and the workers may be confronted with worse working conditions. Workers will in turn respond by re-unionizing. Union activity will therefore fluctuate around an equilibrium.

Are you sure? Is is that easy to re-unionize and get the same benefits for workers? Especially if anti-union laws are put in place, and management makes a point of discouraging unions? The original unionization process didn't happen overnight and sometimes required assistance from government or favorable legislation.

It's worth it to think about the power that unions need to have in order to be able to successfully organize and negotiate with management.

The primary people pushing right to work laws have no interest in worker rights, and a big interest in crushing union activity. That tells you everything about the balance of risk/reward associated with "right to work" laws.

The metaphor I use is, imagine I have 4 people living in a big house with A/C. You announce you don't want A/C - hell, you don't even want electricity. You would prefer to open the windows and use candlelight. Do you have a right to live there, refuse to pay your share of the electric bill, and open the windows, no matter how impacts the consensus choices made by your housemates? No. You have a right to find a house with roommates in agreement with your preferences.

Refusing to pay union dues while working in a union work place is like moving into an air conditioned house, refusing to pay your share of the electric bill and opening the windows. It costs everyone else something, while you derive cooler ambient temperatures that you didn't participate in paying for. It's not ok.

I've had too many bad experiences working under a union to ever claim someone should have to be a member of one just to have a job.

Furthermore, in most industries, in a modern sense, it just makes more sense to found employee owned companies instead of unionizing. Nips to problem in the bud since everyone is the union and saves you the trouble of paying dues into an organization that wont do shit for you but will still sit you down to tell you how greedy your employer is when they negotiated on your behalf for.... ten cents above minimum wage.

Right to work laws are absolutely necessary in today's ridiculously pro-union legal environment.

Unions serve no useful purpose and only exist through government coercion, with government workers themselves making up the majority of unionized workers left in America. If unions made sense in the modern economy, then the labor market wouldn't have weeded them out everywhere they are not protected by government power.

Unions are a self-serving, politically entrenched parasitic bureaucracy on our economy. In other words, they are a cancer on capitalism, which is why socialists love them so much.

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Make Right to Work Federal Law, please.

Like much of GOP legislation 'right to work' means the opposite.

Right To Work states allow employers to fire their employees for little or no reason whatsoever with no recourse.

it is common for workers to be fired simply for reporting a problem or being injured.

If Right to Work busts unions, then I am for it. Unions are the most divisive and negative institutions in American society currently and they should be outlawed.