They simply did as they were told.
The ideas, the outlines and the words themselves came from the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing "bill mill" that produces "model legislation" at the behest of Koch Industries, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, ExxonMobil and the corporate cabal that is always looking to "buy" states.
As the Center for Media and Democracy's "ALEC Exposed" project revealed (in conjunction with The Nation), ALEC has developed binders full of "model legislation" that assaults the rights of working people, consumers and communities.
ALEC's package of "model legislation" includes numerous bills and resolutions that, by any reasonable measure, would be referred to as "no rights at work" schemes.
Those measures formed the basis for HB 4003, the Michigan "Right-to-Work Act" that has provoked mass demonstrations in Lansing and other Michigan communities.
Section after section, line after line, of the Michigan legislation mirrors the ALEC model legislation, as revealed by the "ALEC Exposed" project. "The legislation is straight out of the Koch-funded ALEC playbook," explains Brendan Fischer, the staff counsel with the Center for Media and Democracy. At some points, the Michigan lawmakers shifted words, from "resign or refrain from"a labor organization" in the ALEC model legislation to "refrain or resign from"a labor organization" in one of the two Michigan bills.
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At other points, the Michigan Republicans simply lifted whole sections verbatim, outlining how workers who get the advantage of union representation will not have "to pay any dues, fees, assessments or other charges, of any kind or amount" to a labor organization.
The willingness of legislators in Michigan and, it should be noted, other states to simply take marching orders from ALEC is troubling enough.
But even more troubling is the reason why corporations and politicians in states where the middle class was forged by organized labor agree on the "need" to advance anti-labor legislation.
This is not about economic development, growth or job creation. And it is certainly not about "freedom," as Michigan Governor Rick Snyder claims.
This is about warping democracy so that corporations have a consistent upper hand, with the result being that those politicians who are willing to do the bidding of corporations and wealthy donors are more likely to prevail. In this sense, the best way to understand the recent rush to enact anti-labor legislation is as part of the same initiative that has produced restrictive Voter ID laws, schemes to limit early voting and proposals to eliminate same-day registration.
What distinguishes the anti-labor initiatives is that they do not explicitly seek to make voting more difficult. They seek to make it harder for groups that seek high turnout to get voters motivated, to get voters organized and to get them to the polls.
Ultimately, however, the end result of the assault on labor rights is the same as a direct assault on voting rights: a diminished democracy.
Democracy is, of course, about more than elections. And that's where the anti-union push becomes even more significant. It seeks to narrow the discourse by weakening groups that offer an alternative to a Wall Street--dictated future for communities, states and the nation.
Attacks on labor are nothing new. Michigan is not the first state to enact a "right to work" law--the most draconian of anti-labor initiatives. It is the twenty-fourth. Southern states enacted their laws restricting labor organizing and political engagement decades ago, at a time when legislators and governors in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and other bastions of segregation feared that integrated unions would unite white workers and African-American workers on the side of social improvement. That created barriers to the labor movement in the South at a time when it was still growing in much of the country.
