Union Avoidance: The language and practice of Right-to-Work campaigns in Appalachia

Abstract

This panel will present the history and application of Right-to-Work campaigns in the Appalachian region, and submit a qualitative evaluation of the effects of Right-to-Work on working-class communities following the national \u27Great U Turn\u27 of the 1970s and 1980s. Those decades featured increasingly sophisticated and professionalized political and corporate initiatives to contain and roll back organized labor in the region. Southern states----including Tennessee----adopted Right-to-Work measures following the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act. Employing the language of deeply embedded American cultural values of independence, self-determination, and individualism to discredit even the idea of organized labor. Effectively eliminating contractual union security protections, Right-to-Work laws swiftly expanded in the Old South and the emerging Southwest, where the remnants of institutional legal segregation joined forces with political capitalists in corporations and state legislatures. Such laws have recently been adopted in previous union strongholds such as Michigan and Indiana. Right-to-Work was therefore an essential component of the broader business and political assault on unions, contributing significantly to the erosion of purchasing power, stagnation of wages, and economic security for millions of poor and working-class citizens. The structural redistribution of wealth upwards, and the unchecked concentration of income and wealth and economic opportunity in the Appalachian region, was dramatically catalyzed by the destruction of private sector organized labor. Our panelists will explain and offer recommendations, as well as soliciting lively debate, on this issue. Panelists: Anita Puckett, Virginia Tech Lou Martin, Chatham University John Hennen, Morehead State University Submitter: John Hennen is a professor of labor and working-class studies and Appalachian history at Morehead State University