Our “First Principles Series” is an ongoing awareness effort by Beacon to restore our nation’s commitment to those principles of free markets, individual liberty, and limited government that have made America the best nation in the history of the world. Often, politicians eager to appease constituents can stray from these principles. And voters can be misled into believing that policies violating these principles are in their best interest when they’re not. This series is designed to set the record straight and make the case for standing up for our most important principles, even when it might be politically expedient to ignore them. Read our entire “First Principles Series” here.
I normally wouldn’t link to a bogus study, but I found this recent one by a group called OxFam very instructive. It rated Tennessee as among the “worst states for workers.” Sounds alarming, right? The study dings our state for being right-to-work, which it believes makes unionizing more difficult than it should be. It also scorches us for having a low minimum wage.
So are these policies actually anti-worker? Not hardly. I’ll take each in turn. Right-to-work laws do nothing to prevent unions from organizing. We have plenty of unions and more than 136,000 union workers in the state. All right-to-work laws do is allow people to work even if they choose not to be a member of a union. In states that protect union interests over individual workers, you can be fired if you don’t pay the union, whether you want to be represented by them or not.
Tennesseans believe strongly in the freedom of association. They know that no one should ever be forced to pay for or be part of something they don’t agree with. They made this abundantly clear when 70% of them voted to put right-to-work in our state constitution in 2022. Not only do we protect workers’ right to work without having to pay dues to a union they don’t want to join, but we now recognize it as a fundamental, constitutional right.
States without right-to-work laws use the heavy hand of government to benefit union organizations over the freedoms of individual workers by forcing them to pay for a service they don’t want. I won’t go into detail about how those unions then take all those forced handovers and re-elect the politicians who do their bidding. But there’s a reason the politicians in those states are willing to trample on the rights of individuals to the benefit of the collectivist unions.
So, Tennessee is actually pro-worker by refusing this charade. But are we still anti-worker because we have a low minimum wage law? Maybe, if by that we mean that it makes us anti-wealthy, older, and white workers, because they are the only ones who escape the consequences of minimum wage laws. Study after study shows that minimum wage laws particularly harm low-income, minority, and young workers, effectively pricing any of them out of the job market. Minimum wage laws also raise consumer prices, which also harms the very Americans that minimum wage proponents claim to represent. And with the rise of AI, these laws will only accelerate replacing workers with robots. Double our minimum wage law and see how fast McDonald’s replaces its front-line workers with self-order kiosks.
At the end of the day, it’s not government mandates to pay union dues or receive a certain wage that protect workers. It’s the negotiation that takes place between individual workers and employers that empowers workers to get paid what they earn and choose whether to keep those earnings or join a union to negotiate on their behalf. That’s why more and more people are relocating to Tennessee to live and work and fleeing states that refuse to protect their freedoms, like California, Illinois, and New York. If you really want to know which states protect workers, look no further than where they are voluntarily choosing to go.