Maine House and Senate Rejects Union Busting "Right to Work for Less" Bill

The Maine House voted 76-64 and the Senate voted 20-12 on largely party lines to defeat another union-busting "right to work for less" bill. Senators Scott Cyrway (R-Kennebec) and Rick Bennett (R-Oxford) and Reps. StevenBishop (R-Bucksport) and Russell White (R-Ellsworth) joined majority Democrats to kill the bill. See how your legislator voted here.

The bill LD 187, "An Act to Prohibit Labor Organizations from Imposing Mandatory Service Fees on Nonmembers, would make it illegal to negotiate union security clauses in private sector union contracts. It " would ban contract agreements between workers and employers that require all workers in a bargaining unit to contribute to the costs of union representation.

These bills are not coming from Maine workers. They are copied and pasted laws from national radical anti-worker organizations that seek to drive down wages and workplace standards for everyone. "Right to work" bills were originally pushed by Texas businessman Vance Muse, a racist Southern lobbyist and Ku Klux Klan fan who hated that unions created equality among black and white workers and wanted to maintain segregation in the South.

Unfortunately workers have never had a break from attacks on our rights ever since passage of the1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed for states to pass RTW laws. Republicans have submitted these bills pretty much every session for the past 75 years. We want to thank our legislators who voted against this bill. This is why it is so important that we work to elect pro-labor candidates!