Michigan is expected very soon to reverse its so-called “right-to-work” (RTW) law. The repeal, led by Democrats and passing along strictly partisan lines, is a concrete outcome of the liberal party winning a narrow majority of seats in the state’s House and Senate last November and Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer winning reelection. Democrats managed to outdo Republican-led gerrymandering on Election Day and now hold a two-seat advantage in each chamber.

Showing more party discipline than their counterparts have tended to muster at the federal level in recent years, Michigan Democrats have wasted no time in using their slim legislative advantage in pushing through a repeal of their state’s RTW law. Whitmer is expected to approve the repeal when it reaches her desk.

RTW laws are a particularly insidious conservative ploy to undermine unions. The idea, which conservatives glibly couch in terms of “freedom,” is to prevent unions from collecting mandatory fees from members to sustain themselves. Unions require such fees in order to fund the operations of serving and representing their members. It’s the same with any club that offers perks—membership dues fund operations.

Unions gained the right to do this under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. But less than a decade later, that right was eroded when Congress passed the 1947 Labor Management Relations Act, also known as Taft-Hartley, which first opened the door for RTW laws. In 2018, conservative justices at the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of such laws for public sector workers, adding momentum to the rightward shift.

The National Labor Relations Board explains the current state of the Republican-led anti-union trend in this way: “If you work in a state that bans union-security agreements, (27 states), each employee at a workplace must decide whether or not to join the union and pay dues, even though all workers are protected by the collective bargaining agreement negotiated by the union. The union is still required to represent all workers.” Imagine calling AAA and demanding its roadside benefits without paying the auto club’s modest yearly fee.

Recognizing that dues are a source of unions’ financial power, Republicans used every advantage, including ill-gotten ones like gerrymandered districts, to push through RTW laws in more than half of all states. They used deceptive language—who doesn’t want the right to work?—and convinced voters it was in their interest to weaken unions without saying the laws were intended to weaken unions. Americans for Prosperity, a conservative pro-business think tank that we are expected to believe cares about workers’ rights, claimed that RTW laws were about “permitting workers the freedom to decide for themselves whether they want to join a union and pay dues.”

For years, I was required to pay dues to my union, SAG-AFTRA, because California, where I live, is not an RTW state. I did so happily, because even at the nonprofit community radio station where I worked, management was continuously trying to lower operating costs at the expense of workers’ wages and benefits. Union representation helped stave off staff cuts, represented workers in grievance filings, and became our collective voice during contract negotiations. Unions are not just for corporate or government workplaces. They are not just for poorly treated or underpaid workers at Amazon, Starbucks, or Walmart. All nonmanagement workers deserve the kind of power that a union brings. And it’s precisely that power that conservative lawmakers have been (successfully) chipping away at.

The data is clear: those states where RTW laws have been on the books show lower rates of unionization and lower wages overall. A June 2022 paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research examined five states where such laws had been in effect since 2011. The researchers concluded unequivocally that, “RTW laws lower wages and unionization rates.”

According to the Economic Policy Institute—which has come to similar data-driven conclusions as the aforementioned paper—Michigan’s reversal of the GOP’s anti-union statute would be “the first time a state has repealed a RTW law in nearly 60 years.” The victory is all the more significant because of the state’s historic position as having had “the highest unionization rate in the country” and correspondingly high median wages before Republicans passed an RTW law in 2012. But in the past decade, unionization rates and wages both fell in Michigan. In other words, the state’s RTW law had its intended result.

Now, following Michigan, Democrats in other RTW states such as Arizona and Virginia have introduced laws to restore union power. At the federal level, Senator Elizabeth Warren has reintroduced the Nationwide Right to Unionize Act, which would repeal all RTW state laws. The PRO Act would similarly restore the right of unions to collect member dues nationally.

Conservative Republicans are likely terrified of how Michigan might embolden pro-union momentum across the country. Unsurprisingly, Fox News published an op-ed by billionaire Doug DeVos denouncing the repeal of Michigan’s anti-union law. DeVos’s Michigan-based family made its fortune on Amway, a business that Jacobin’s Rachel T. Johnson called, “the world’s biggest pyramid scheme.” (If the name sounds familiar, he is indeed the brother-in-law of former Education Secretary under Donald Trump Betsy DeVos.)

Doug Devos’s Fox News op-ed is titled, “I know firsthand how much right to work matters,” which might be a true enough statement coming from a billionaire whose family made its fortune on the backs of workers. He also identified precisely that “What’s happening in Michigan is the direct result of the November elections. Democrats won control of the legislature for the first time in nearly four decades.”

But then he veered into the kind of unproven claims that only a pyramid schemer might have the gall to make openly, that “right-to-work states have seen faster job growth, faster income growth, and faster population growth.” He also cited, without proof (after all, it’s Fox News!), that Michigan’s RTW law led to “rising incomes,” and “falling unemployment and poverty.”

Ultimately, DeVos is worried that “Repealing right to work will send a message that our state… will suffer from… less freedom.” And there again is that vague buzzword, freedom. What DeVos really means but doesn’t say is that he thinks workers deserve the freedom to live under the thumb of their corporate bosses, the freedom to remain in jobs that pay less and less, and the freedom to walk away from poorly paid jobs.

Freedom is the blank slate on which conservatives have projected their wildest profit-driven fantasies. But those fantasies are the flip side of their fears of worker power. It’s no surprise that RTW laws stemmed from the Taft-Hartley Act, a pro-business law intended to curb the power of multiracial worker movements.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. presciently said, “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.” In the war of words over freedom, Dr. King beats DeVos any day.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.  

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Happy Equal Pay Day? Here are 6 charts showing why it’s not much of a celebration.

By Chabeli Carrazana, Jasmine Mithani

Despite progress in other areas of American life, women are still facing discrimination in the workplace — and it’s showing up in their paychecks. 

Tuesday’s Equal Pay Day marks the continuing discrepancy between men and women’s salaries, a date the country has been recognizing since 1996. But in the 27 years since the effort began to bring attention to the pay gap, it has narrowed very little. 

In 2023, women are earning 77 cents for every dollar earned by White men, the racial group with the highest pay across occupations.

That figure takes the average pay for all full- and part-time working women and compares it with the average pay for White men. The figure is calculated based on earnings in 2021, the most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau. 

In 1996, women were earning 75 cents to the White man’s $1. Then, the number was calculated using only the wages for full-time workers — today the gap comparing full-time earnings alone would be 84 cents for women compared with $1 for White men. 

As Equal Pay Day has evolved, the calculation has changed to be more representative of all types of workers, a recognition that one of the drivers of the gap is the fact that women are more likely to work in lower paid jobs and in part-time positions. 

Leaving those workers out of the equation misses how deep the disparities really are,  In recent years, new Equal Pay Days have been added that look at race and other factors such as motherhood, addressing how women at the intersection of multiple identities are being hit harder by discrimination in the workplace. Equal Pay Days for moms, Black women, Latinas, Native American women and Asian American and Pacific Islander women are recognized on t day in the new year it would take each of those women to catch up to the earnings White men made the year prior.

Also until recently, wages were only analyzed in the gender binary, comparing men and women. Data on LGBTQ+ Americans has been at best limited and at worst nonexistent. Advocates now mark Equal Pay Day for LGBTQ+ people during Pride month in June, a symbolic placement that is used to raise awareness to the fact that the country still doesn’t know what the pay gap is for nonbinary Americans and trans people.

Occupational segregation, the reality that women are concentrated in certain jobs, typically low-paid service sector positions, drives half of the gender pay gap, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families. 

But for decades, employers claimed that women were more likely to be in those jobs out of choice, said Aniela Unguresan, the founder of the EDGE Certified Foundation, a leading certifier of diversity, equity and inclusion for businesses across the globe. Much of her work focuses on the gender pay gap. 

“For a very long time we thought that's a fact of life — there is nothing we can do about it. [Women] don't want those positions of power and authority. They don't aspire to them,” Unguresan said.

In recent decades it’s become clear that’s not the case, she said. 

Studies have found that the inhospitable culture for women in fields dominated by men — stereotypes of them as caregivers or perceptions that they are less qualified — combined with paltry paid leave benefits and limited representation is what has blocked women from entering those fields, not lack of desire or ambition. 

And regardless of the industry, whether it’s the legal field of the service sector, the gender pay gap is visible in almost every single occupation when comparing average wages for men and women.

Occupational segregation, then, occurs when there is no pipeline for women to enter into different fields — and it hurts women of color especially. 

About 1 in 7 Latinas work in the hospitality sector, the most of any group. About 1 in 5 Black women work in the health care sector, but in the lowest paid jobs in the industry, including in long-term care, nursing and as nursing aides. As a result, at least 50 percent of all women of color — Black women, Latinas, Native American women and Asian American and Pacific Islander women — are earning below a living wage in 40 states.

The pay gap is so prevalent, in fact, that it’s visible in every state in the country.

The gap is typically wider across the South, where many women of color are concentrated, and in states where women make up larger shares of the workforce in low-wage jobs. In Nevada, for example, women are most likely to work as housekeepers. In Utah, they’re most likely to be customer service representatives. In Louisiana, they’re most likely to be elementary and middle school teachers. 

A combination of race and job distribution, as well as minimum wage laws and job protections, factor into each state’s gap.

The other driver of the pay gap is continuing discrimination, and perhaps one of the clearest examples of how it plays out is in looking at what happens to the pay gap as women age. 

Conventional notions of men as breadwinners and women as caregivers are so entrenched that women are still seeing penalties to their pay after they become mothers — or, regardless of if they have children, around the age when women typically become mothers. 

Men who have children instead get a bonus in pay, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center. 

According to Pew, younger women ages 25 to 34 have been edging closer to parity with men over the years, but then the gap begins to widen as they age. A good share of that widening happens when women are between 35 and 44, the ages when they are most likely to have children under 18 at home. 

Because the United States is one of only about a handful of countries on the planet that doesn’t offer paid family leave, women who have children are often expected to return to work within mere weeks of giving birth. A quarter of moms return to work two weeks after childbirth. But most daycares won’t take children until they are at least six weeks old — if parents can even find a spot and pay for the expense. The cost of child care exceeds the cost of in-state public college tuition in 34 states and Washington, D.C. 

This broken care system makes it difficult for mothers to stay in the workforce. About 1.4 million younger mothers left the workforce in 2022, Pew found. When they return, they are often returning at lower pay and are routinely passed over for promotions due to stereotypes that they are less committed to their jobs.

Closing a gap that has been frozen for decades will have to come through legislation, advocates said.

One potential piece of legislation is the Paycheck Fairness Act, which was reintroduced in Congress last week. The bill would strengthen existing equal pay legislation, barring employers from asking about a worker’s salary history, and, in cases of alleged discrimination, employers would have to prove why a pay disparity exists.

The bill was first introduced in 1997 and has yet to pass. 

Even still, some argue that the proposal doesn’t go far enough. 

Unguresan, who works with Fortune 500 companies in the United States and Europe, said the key differentiator in why Europe has been more successful in closing the gap is legislation around quotas for women in certain jobs, expansive paid leave benefits and pay transparency reporting. Unlike in the United States, those are matters of the law and not a company’s choice, she said.

Take the quota legislation in France — executive teams and boards have to be made up of 40 percent women by 2030. When France first enacted a quota for executive boards more than a decade ago, the share of women shot up from 10 percent in 2009 to 45 percent in 2019. 

“Europe has many more regulations and legislation. … You can hate them, you can love them, but you cannot ignore them,” Unguresan said. “The law is the law — that’s it.”

Check out the charts.

This story was originally published by The 19th, March 14, 2023.

Corporate health insurers have been conducting a stealth takeover of our Medicare system, under the guise of “Medicare Advantage.” Over the past year, the degree to which Medicare Advantage plans are costing taxpayers more for worse health outcomes¹ has led activists to call Medicare Advantage plans “killer plans.”

Now, the Biden administration is taking steps to discourage seniors from joining these killer plans―but corporate insurance lobbyists are fighting tooth and nail. Can you take a few minutes to fight back and protect seniors?

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is collecting comments from the public in support of its rate increase for privatized Medicare plans―which would help keep corporate insurers from undercutting traditional Medicare. Corporate lobbyists are making their voices heard, so we need to be even louder by flooding the comment site with our voices.

Here’s what you can do:

1.      Go to the comment page on Regulations.gov
https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/CMS-2023-0010-0001

2.     Copy one of these sample comments, and either submit it as is or personalize it.
Comment one:
I strongly support the CMS proposed 1 percent rate increase for Medicare Advantage plans in 2024. It is an important step towards eliminating billions of dollars in waste, keeping Part B premiums in check, protecting the integrity of the Medicare Trust Fund and strengthening Medicare.
Comment two:
The proposed rate increase ends some of the MA upcoding that wrongly drives up Medicare Advantage plan payments. This upcoding allows the Medicare Advantage plans to make their enrollees look sicker than they are and earn additional revenue, even though they do not provide additional services or incur additional costs for those members.
Comment three:
We stand behind this proposed one percent increase and urge CMS to finalize it. If anything, the proposed rate increase does not go far enough to eliminate waste and address overpayments to MA plans, which is weakening the Medicare program. MedPAC says that the excess payments in MA are $27 billion this year alone, six percent higher than Traditional Medicare. Other experts find that they are closer to 20 percent higher.  

3.     Enter your contact information and Press Submit!

This isn’t as simple as some of the other actions we ask you to take―but it’s very important. These messages go directly to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services!