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I. Introduction
"Right to work" has always meant different things to different people. Today most people associate the term with laws passed by twenty-one states pursuant to Section 14(b) of the Labor-Management Relations Act (the Taft-Hartley Act) of 1947 which reads, "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as authorizing the execution or application of agreements requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment in any State or Territory in which such execution or application is prohibited by State or Territorial law."
Forced membership (and, later, forced dues payments by nonmembers) in unions is called union security, and there are four common types of union security agreements between unions and employers. In a closed shop (which has been illegal throughout the U.S. since 1947) all employees must be union members before they begin work; in a union shop, membership is required after a probationary period on the job; in an agency shop, workers do not have to become members, but they all must pay dues or "service fees" to the unions that represent them; under maintenance of membership, workers who choose to become union members must remain members for the life of an extant collective bargaining contract. In right-to-work states all forms of union security may be proscribed.1
According to conventional wisdom, the original National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) of 1935 did not permit states to proscribe union security agreements, so Section 14(b) purportedly gave birth to state right-to-work laws. Actually, the right of states to proscribe union security agreements not only was recognized by the 73rd and 74th Congresses (1933-1936) in general, it was also recognized and endorsed by Senator Robert Wagner (D-N.Y.) himself. The reason a 14(b)-like clause was absent in the Wagner Act was that its proponents and opponents alike thought that it would be redundant to state the obvious.
My main purposes are to tell the story of right to work before and after Section 14(b) and to clarify the issues. The endless debate about whether people have a right to work or not is, to understate the matter, a muddle. Much of the confusion is lexical: The protagonists simply do not agree on the definitions of key words. In the next section I briefly explain...