Union campaign committee We Are Ohio embraced the narrative that workplace freedom is racist following the sudden passage of a right to work law in Michigan. In a series of posts through late December, We Are Ohio directed its 110,000 Facebook fans to stories variously depicting workplace freedom supporters as Ku Klux Klan members and describing workplace freedom as an attack on civil rights.
The amendment to the Ohio Constitution proposed by Ohioans for Workplace Freedom would protect the right of Ohioans to choose whether to pay a union. We Are Ohio has received over 95 percent of its funding from unions.
On December 17, We Are Ohio linked to an Institute for Southern Studies blog post titled “The racist roots of ‘right to work’ laws.” We Are Ohio commented, “These laws are blatant attacks on worker rights and safety.”
The following day, We Are Ohio linked to a story at The Huffington Post titled, “You Hate Right To Work Laws More Than You Know. Here’s Why.” The Huffington Post story was merely a paragraph from a Not Safe For Work Corporation blog entry, with a hyperlink to the entire post at its original location.
“This is an unfair attack on good jobs, workers’ rights and workplace safety,” We Are Ohio wrote in a Facebook post linking to the story.
On December 23, We Are Ohio linked to a Detroit Free Press editorial by the president of the Michigan NAACP, who called for the repeal of Michigan’s workplace freedom law because it “will effectively pull that ladder out from under Michigan’s middle class, and the black workers who make up its backbone.”
“This is a civil rights issue,” We Are Ohio wrote.
We Are Ohio linked to the Free Press editorial again on December 29, commenting, “The head of Michigan’s NAACP explains why No Rights at Work is WRONG for minorities, working families and the middle class.”
The graphic shown above is from the Not Safe For Work Corporation story We Are Ohio directed its fans to by way of The Huffington Post. We Are Ohio was joined by the AFL-CIO in its official use of the race card against workplace freedom, suggesting a series of Facebook posts from December is not the last Ohioans will hear of this.
Ultimately, this line of argument – smearing current workplace freedom efforts as racist because some racists embraced right to work in the 1940s – reflects the level to which We Are Ohio must sink. We Are Ohio is a union group fighting for the continuation of forced union dues.
As with other We Are Ohio talking points, claiming workplace freedom is racist is not only a distraction, but a dishonest one, portraying the union bosses of old as champions of racial equality.
“But in 1895, unable to launch an interracial machinists’ union of its own, the Federation reversed an earlier principled decision and chartered the whites-only International Association of Machinists,” the History Channel wrote in a summary of America’s labor movement. “Formally or informally, the color bar thereafter spread throughout the trade union movement. In 1902, blacks made up scarcely 3 percent of total membership, most of them segregated in Jim Crow locals.”
For much, much more about the racist history of AFL-CIO and other unions, refer to George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein’s “Racism, Railroad Unions, and Labor Regulations,” and to Hillsdale College history professor Paul Moreno’s “Unions and Discrimination.”
Pulling the race card may not have even been We Are Ohio’s most despicable act in December. On December 7, the “citizen-driven, community-based, bipartisan coalition” compared the Michigan legislators who passed workplace freedom to the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Cross-posted from the archived Media Trackers Ohio site.