“Right-to-work” sounds like a philosophy that might be beneficial to the working class; it is anything but and most workers do not know that its creator was one of the most virulent racists that the country has produced.

The intention of right-to-work (RTW) advocates was to stop unionization in its tracks and, therefore, to stop workers from joining together to represent their own interests and the interests of their families and communities. It was in the years of World War II that the corporations (then known as Big Business) and right-wing politicians were about to ramp up their already generations-old attacks on the working class. How to stop workers from forming unions, which were encouraged and made legal by laws passed in the Franklin Roosevelt Administration?

There were many ways that Corporate America devised, and RTW was among the primary ones. It sounded as if the powers that be were setting up the working class with jobs that would support a family and provide the benefits of a decent living. It was all a sham, nothing more than a public relations term that had nothing behind it to provide even a single job, let alone a good one. But it sounded good and that was the objective.

Proponents of RTW were saying to the working class, “This is good for you. We’re going to make sure that you have a chance to make it on your own, without the baggage of a union (a third party) interrupting your relationship with the bosses. You, too, can make it on your own.” Several decades later, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made it official, for those workers who did not understand: There is no such thing as society, she preached. We are all individuals and you should expect to make it on your own, or not.

Unions are the antithesis of that view of life. Only in unions are workers able to confront Capital and win their proper place in Thatcher’s “society.” Unions are the way to somewhat equal the power of management, of Capital, to wrest from it what they, their families, and their communities deserve as part of society. When Thatcher said that there was no such thing as “society,” she was carrying on an age-old attempt to keep workers in their place, usually a place of subjugation, second-class at best.

At the time of great union organizing, after World War II, corporations and southern planters were very worried that the idea of workplace equality through unionization was spreading and needed to be stopped. After all, black workers in the south had been and were being approached by organizers of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and they were listening. Anything that would slow down or stop union organizing was to be supported, because the bosses could see that unions would, indeed, give workers the strength they needed and sought. RTW laws were part of the answer then, as it is now for corporations and the wealthy.

The man who pushed RTW into the public’s eye was Vance Muse of the Christian American Association, who was a political operative and opponent of all that unions and the labor movement stood for. According to Michael Pierce, a professor at the University of Arkansas, Muse responded to a 1941 Labor Day editorial in the Dallas Morning News, in a piece by William Ruggles. On that day, Ruggles called for national legislation that would prohibit the closed shop. He was the person who suggested right-to-work as the term Muse could use for his movement and Muse took it up with the greatest enthusiasm.

He ran with it. Muse fought to deny FDR the nomination for president in 1936, believing that the New Deal would disturb the racial order in the South, which was Jim Crow time. Professor Pierce, in his work on the origins of RTW, wrote: “Among Muse’s activities on behalf of the Southern Committee was the distribution of what Time called ‘cheap pamphlets containing blurred photographs of the Roosevelts consorting with Negroes’ accompanied by ‘blatant text proclaiming them ardent Negrophiles.’ Muse later defended the action and the use of its most provocative photograph: ‘I am a Southerner and for white supremacy . . . . It was a picture of Mrs. Roosevelt going to some n----r meeting with two escorts, n----rs, on each arm.’”

Muse’s own grandson, according to Pierce, described him as “a white supremacist, an anti-Semite, and a Communist-baiter, a man who beat on labor unions not on behalf of working people, as he said, but because he was paid to do so.” Like so many union-haters who came after him, Muse was a multi-talented hater. He was an anti-semite, as well. Whether he did it only for the money or not, it does not appear that anyone could approach union-destruction with such zeal, if he did not believe it profoundly.

RTW allows workers to enjoy the benefits of a union without joining or even paying dues or the equivalent of dues to help pay for the union’s operation. It was and still is, aimed at weakening the beneficial effects of a union in the workplace and gives Capital even more power than it naturally has in a non-union boss-worker relationship. It was true in Vances’ time and it is true now.

The philosophy of RTW has been seen in a number of organizing drives and other labor situations, just in the past decade. For example, former Tennessee U.S. Senator Bob Corker might as well have been on the staff of the union-busters at Volkswagen in Chattenooga, when he successfully beat back the union’s organizing effort. It was front and center in Bessemer, Alabama, where Jeff Bezos soundly beat the effort of a largely-black workforce at the Amazon “fulfillment center,” using every tactic that all of Corporate America has learned since the time of Muse.

In South Carolina, one of the best (or worst) examples of RTW philosophy was the statement of then-Governor Nikki Haley, in 2014 when she was governor of the state: “It’s (unions) not something we want to see happening.” She told the Greenville News at the time, “We discourage any companies that have unions from wanting to come to South Carolina because we don’t want to take the water.” More specifically, she said she would tell Ford, Chrysler, or Chevrolet to stay out of her state if they were to bring their unions along. She has welcomed foreign car companies, as long as they remain non-union.

Pierce explains Muse’s position on RTW and anti-semitism: “In November 1944, Arkansas and Florida became the first states to enact Right-to-Work laws (California voters rejected the measure). In the wake of the Arkansas victory, Muse half-heartedly denied the racist and anti-Semitic origins of Right-to-Work: “They call me anti-Jew and anti-n----r. Listen we like the n----r—in his place . . . . Our [Right-to-Work] amendment helps the n----r; it does not discriminate against him. Good n----rs, not those Communist n----rs. Jews? Why some of my best friends are Jews. Good Jews.”

The map of the U.S. with the RTW states marked shows a concentration of them in the former Confederacy, although RTW has infected some of the mid-western states and even some northern states, like Michigan and Wisconsin (birthplace of the nation’s progressive movement). RTW has been called right-to-work-for-less by workers in the know because the states that have such laws are, by and large, those states with the poorest housed, poorest educated, poorest fed citizens. And, they are among the unhealthiest Americans. RTW states should feel grateful that states without such laws are willing to support them in their time of need. And, they are always needy.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a former newspaper reporter and labor organizer, who lives in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Contact Mr. Funiciello and BC.