POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On January 3, John McNay, the President of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, appeared with Ohio AFL-CIO President Tim Burga on Ed Ferenc’s radio program “America’s Workforce Radio.” Among other topics related to the labor movement, they addressed “right to work” theats looming in Ohio and nationally. The audio of the…
Ohio State Rep. Tom Brinkman has announced that he is planning on introducing a bill that will ban “closed shops” and forbid unions from charging “fair-share fees” to non-union workers at private-sector workplaces. He has indicated that the bill will not apply to public-sector unions, which would have been similarly restricted by Senate Bill…
Several weeks ago, I was at a meeting for the leaders of “We Are Ohio” member and allied groups in southwestern Ohio, and one of the featured speakers asked the following rhetorical question about the corporate-funded “right to work” campaigns: “When was the last time that you heard of corporations spending millions of dollars to…
The US Supreme Court will hear the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, where some anti-union high school teachers are trying to avoid paying an agency fee to the union that represents them, as part of the so-called “right to work” campaign. Let’s ignore for a moment the devastating effects such a ruling against…
Uninsured, by State, in August 2014: Source: Gallup Well-Being Index [http://www.well-beingindex.com/]. Uninsured, by County, in August 2014: Source: Enroll America [https://www.enrollamerica.org/research-maps/maps/changes-in-uninsured-rates-by-county/] Percentages Using Federal Exchanges: Source: Washington Center for Equitable Growth [http://equitablegrowth.org/interactive/aca-beneficiaries/] __________________________ Previous posts in this series have included: Part 1: Population Growth and Movement: https://academeblog.org/2013/04/03/2666/. Part 2: Immigration: https://academeblog.org/2013/04/21/right-to-work-by-the-numbers-part-2/. Part…
Patricia Arquette is being slammed from both the Left and the Right for her comments during and after her acceptance speech for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. From the Left, the criticism has come largely from other disadvantaged groups who feel that her focus was too narrowly on women’s issues,…
The recently inaugurated Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, has signed an executive order banning public-employee unions from collecting fair-share contributions from those employees who choose not to belong to the unions that represent them. I very recently did a post on the very skewed logic behind “right to work” legislation—see https://academeblog.org/2015/02/07/right-to-work-provides-workers-with-many-rights/ Rauner, previously the…
John T. McNay is a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, president of the Ohio Conference, American Association of University Professors, and author of “Collective Bargaining and the Battle of Ohio: The Defeat of Senate Bill 5 and the Struggle to Defend the Middle Class,” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. This op-ed…
What follows is a list of U.S. states by GDP and GDP per capita in 2010. The “right to work” states are indicated in boldface. Rank GDP Pct. of US Pop. GDP Per Rank Per Total GDP (000’s) GDP (Millions) Capita Capita United States 14,657,800 100.00 308.7 47,482 1 California 1,936,400 13.34 37.3 51,914 11…
Employment in Manufacturing Today, only about 8.2% of U.S. workers are employed in manufacturing. Even before the Great Recession, manufacturing employment in the U.S. had been steadily declining, with a loss of approximately 4,000,000 jobs between 1998 and 2007, the decade preceding the recession. Another 1.6 million jobs in manufacturing were lost between 2008 and…