"Farm, farm workers, Mt. Williamson in background, Manzanar Relocation Center, California", Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [LC-DIG-ppprs-00370]
In more than half of U.S. states, a so-called “right-to-work” law limits workers’ ability to form sustained, well-funded unions. These laws –which ban union security agreements requiring all workers who benefit from a union contract to either join or pay dues to the union that negotiated it—allow workers to opt out of joining the union while still receiving union wages, benefits, and representation. These laws aim to decrease union membership levels and, in turn, disrupt workplace solidarity, political lobbying power, and financial resources. The AFL-CIO describes right-to-work as a policy “designed to take away rights from working people.” Economists studying the effects of existing right-to-work laws have argued that state union security bans reduce union membership, annual wages, financial wellbeing, and job stability.
Right-to-work was inaugurated in 1944 when Arkansas and Florida passed the first statewide union security bans. Looking back, it would make sense to assume that the subsequent right-to-work movement began in response to the unprecedented industrial labor organizing in this period. In 1935, labor earned robust legal organizing protections with the landmark National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Among other provisions, the act obligated employers to collectively bargain with their workers, protected workers’ right to strike, and created the National Labor Relations Board to enforce fair labor practices. A few years later during World War II, unions jumped at the chance to utilize these new protections and organize the workers flooding into defense plants. As a result, national union membership increased by five million people—or 70 percent—between 1940 and 1945. In response, industrial employers began searching for ways to undermine this surge in unionization and labor organizing protections.
Yet, while researching the origins of right-to-work for my dissertation, I found that the first right-to-work crusaders were not the industrial moguls combating unions in the growing defense plants. Instead, the state -level right-to-work movement that we know today was started by large farm employers and their lobbyists with the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-DIG-fsa-8b28528]
The first 1944 right-to-work laws were passed by ballot referendum in Arkansas and Florida, two heavily agricultural states in the barely unionized U.S. South. Why, I asked, would farm employers—whose workers were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935—want to pass bans on union security during World War II? The reason: because farmworkers were trying to organize into unions and demand union security agreements, even without the protections of the new federal labor law.
During WWII, farmworkers and organizers across the South used the wartime demand for farm labor and the unprecedented government oversight of agriculture to build union membership and bargain for union security. As the Southern Tenant Farmers Union recruited workers to fulfill federal wartime agricultural needs, for example, its leaders required that those farmworkers join their union as a condition of job placement. While picking crops for the war effort, these workers and their union leaders called on the expanded and sympathetic federal wartime bureaucracy to enforce their promised working conditions. In Florida, the CIO’s United Cannery Agricultural Packing and Allied Workers of America revamped its previously abandoned efforts to organize farmworkers by sending union organizers to the state’s citrus fields. Not only did these citrus pickers strike for and win a union security agreement, but they also challenged the legal boundaries between industrial and farm labor which excluded farmworkers in the first place.
For the region’s farm employers—used to exploiting an oversaturated, unorganized, impoverished, and isolated workforce—these developments were unacceptable. In response, they utilized local political networks, the Farm Bureau’s national resources, and wartime rhetoric of freedom and liberty to campaign for their states’ citizens’ “right-to-work” without having to join a union.
Notably, the agribusiness employers, farm lobbyists, and anti-union politicians who spearheaded Arkansas’ and Florida’s pioneering right-to-work campaigns utilized a strategy that had yet to take hold among industrial employer groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers. Specifically, the American Farm Bureau Federation intentionally fostered county- and state-level networks of farm employers and sympathetic politicians opposed to labor unions. When the time came, these networks were able to mobilize and execute an effective political campaign against union security.
"Oiling combine during winter wheat harvest. Whitman County, Washington", Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, [LC-USF34-004859-D]
For example, the eccentric, anti-union state attorney general of Florida, Tom Watson, knew the value of local power dynamics as he allied with Farm Bureau-organized Florida citrus growers in 1943 to pass a union security ban in the state. Later, he would organize other state attorneys general to advocate that the federal government protect states’ rights to pass right-to-work laws. Edward Asbury O’Neal, then president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, also knew the value of local organizing when he promised to get America’s farmers—represented by local and state Farm Bureau chapters across the country—to “do a little marching” in favor of amending (and gutting) the National Labor Relations Act in 1947. The ultimate Taft-Hartley Labor Management Relations Act would, for the first time, explicitly sanction and protect state right-to-work laws.
To this day, the right-to-work movement relies on state legislation to gradually ban union security agreements across the country. Yet the history of right-to-work legislation offers two potential insights for labor organizers seeking to combat this trend.
First, it points to the importance of state-level political organizing. In 1944, state-level right-to-work campaigns succeeded in the South with the help of local farm employers and politicians. Eighty years later, the repeal of Michigan’s right-to-work law in 2023 demonstrates that this kind of local organizing can be harnessed to dismantle anti-union laws as well. After two citizen-led ballot initiatives in 2018 expanded voter registration and democratized the redistricting process in Michigan, the state legislature turned blue, gained several former union members as representatives, and rejected the state’s previous union security ban. Likewise, California lawmakers are combatting hostile federal policies by passing state-level labor protections. Unions, activists, and labor-friendly politicians must not forget the value of investing in local elections and sustained grassroots organizing networks.
Second, right-to-work’s history highlights just how critical it is for well-established unions in sectors such as transportation and education to support and collaborate with farmworker movements. The first right-to-work campaigns were part of a “divide and conquer” strategy that aimed to prevent farmworkers from joining, and bolstering, the growing union movement. As history shows us, this strategy succeeded, effectively keeping most farmworkers out of nationwide labor unions and undercutting working-class political solidarity. Despite the legal and logistical obstacles to farmworker organizing, the labor movement must push back against employer efforts to keep farmworkers separated and isolated from the rest of the working-class. All workers and unions can benefit from connecting with existing farmworker organizations, investing time and funds into progressive farm labor legislation, and supporting and amplifying farmworker actions.
Today, national leaders are promising to protect right-to-work laws and continuing to divide the workforce through targeted labor and immigration policies. Just this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained an immigrant farmworker organizer in Washington state in what grassroots organizers believe was a targeted attack. In times like these, we must heed the important lessons that past labor organizers—and their adversaries—have to offer to those fighting to protect workers’ right to organize in the United States right now.
