Indiana 'right to work' law: what it means for the pro-union Rust Belt

Many union workers don't agree with the politicking associated with organized labor, and they should have the right to withdraw their dues in protest, says Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee, a nonprofit advocacy organization in Springfield, Va.

"The reason union officials are scared of right to work is they're worried that if workers in Indiana have a choice to support them, some will choose not to," he says.

Indiana is the 23rd state to adopt right-to-work legislation. The law is more prevalent in the South and West than it is in the Midwest.

Some in Indiana, like state Rep. Jerry Torr, who wrote the bill, hope that the Indiana victory will result in subsequent right-to-work measures spreading through the Midwest's traditional manufacturing belt.

But it's unclear whether the legislation will have broader support.

Indiana has the lowest union workforce in the Rust Belt, which is another reason why right to work easily passed there and why similar legislation faces bigger hurdles in states close to its borders.

Along with Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, Governor Snyder in Michigan says right-to-work legislation is not on his agenda. He told lawmakers in January not to propose a bill because it would be too divisive and would distract from creating jobs immediately.

What's more, there is little worry that companies will suddenly uproot and move to Indiana, except in a few bordering counties where the "transportation costs and workforce availability are going to be the same," says Donald Grimes, a senior research associate at the Institute for Research on Labor, Employment, and the Economy at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

After all, Montana, Colorado, and New Mexico all sustain strong economies despite sharing borders with right-to-work states, he says.

In Indiana, the right-to-work law will most certainly cripple the finances of the state's Democratic Party – which some say was the real motivation behind the legislation.

"There is clearly a political motive [by Republicans] behind weakening what is clearly a strong force within the Democratic Party," says Robert Bruno, director of the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

The Democratic Party in Indiana receives one-third of its funding from organized labor. Unlike other Midwest states with strong progressive communities, Indiana has a political spectrum in which liberals come mainly from unions, making unions even more valuable to Democrats.

"At the end of the day, most of our members feel [right to work] is more about politics than about economics," says Jeff Harris, a spokesman for the Indiana chapter of the AFL-CIO. "This is political payback and about rewarding friends and kicking out enemies."

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