Michigan Repealed Right-to-Work, and What That Means

In December 2012, thousands of union members filled the grounds of the Michigan Capitol in Lansing in the cold, chanting outside a building where a lame-duck Republican legislature was passing a law most of them had assumed they would never see in their state. Michigan was the home of the United Auto Workers, the place where the Flint sit-down had forced General Motors to the table in 1937, and one of the most heavily unionized states in the country. Governor Rick Snyder, who had said for much of his term that right-to-work was not on his agenda, signed the bills almost as soon as they reached his desk. A little over ten years later, on March 24, 2023, Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed a repeal. It was the first time any state had undone a right-to-work law in nearly six decades. The two signings, one in winter and one in early spring, bracket a story about what these laws actually do and why both sides fight so hard over a rule most voters cannot define.

In short: Right-to-work laws bar contracts that require workers covered by a union to pay any fee for representation. Michigan adopted one in 2012 and, after Democrats won full control of state government in 2022, repealed it in 2023, effective in 2024. The fight turns on a real disagreement about individual choice versus fair sharing of costs, and on contested evidence about jobs and wages.

What a right-to-work law does, and does not do

The name is the first source of confusion. A right-to-work law does not guarantee anyone a job, and it does not protect workers from being fired. It governs one narrow thing: whether a union contract can require the workers it covers to pay for representation.

Under federal law, when a majority of workers at a workplace choose a union, that union becomes the exclusive bargaining representative for everyone in the unit, members and non-members alike. It has a legal duty to represent all of them fairly, including in grievances. To pay for that work, unions have long negotiated union-security clauses, under which every covered worker pays at least a fee for the cost of bargaining and contract administration. No one can be forced to become a full member; the most a contract can require is a fee.

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 gave states the option, in Section 14(b), to ban those clauses. A state that does so is a right-to-work state. In those states, a worker covered by a union contract can decline to pay anything while still receiving the wages, benefits and representation the contract provides. Public-sector workers everywhere have been in a similar position since the Supreme Court's 2018 Janus decision, which applies to government employees nationwide. Michigan's repeal therefore mattered most for private-sector workers.

How Michigan got the law

Right-to-work spread quickly across the South and the Plains after 1947, and for decades it seemed confined there. Then the Great Recession and the Republican wave of 2010 changed the map. Indiana adopted a right-to-work law in early 2012. Wisconsin had already, in 2011, passed Act 10, which sharply limited collective bargaining for most public employees. Michigan's turn came in the lame-duck session that December, after the November elections and before new legislators took their seats.

Supporters made a straightforward economic argument. Site-selection consultants, they said, routinely screened out states without right-to-work laws, so Michigan was losing manufacturing investment to its neighbours and to the South. They also made a moral argument: no one should have to pay a private organization to keep a job. The bills were attached to an appropriation, which under the Michigan constitution protected them from a voter referendum.

Opponents argued that the law had been rushed through without hearings, that it was designed to weaken the unions that fund Democratic campaigns, and that it would let workers take the benefits of a contract without paying for it. They pointed out that a union cannot refuse to represent non-payers in a grievance; it must spend money defending even workers who pay nothing.

How it was repealed

The opening came in November 2022. Michigan Democrats won majorities in both chambers of the legislature and kept the governor's office, giving the party full control of the state government for the first time in roughly four decades. Redistricting by an independent citizens commission, created by a 2018 ballot initiative, had produced maps that many observers considered fairer than the ones drawn previously, and turnout was high in a year when abortion rights were also on the ballot.

Repeal was an early priority. The legislature passed it in March 2023, and Whitmer signed it alongside a separate bill restoring the state's prevailing-wage law for public construction projects, which the legislature had repealed in 2018. Because the bills did not pass with the two-thirds vote needed for immediate effect, the repeal took effect in February 2024, ninety-one days after the legislative session ended.

The repeal did not create any new union, and it did not require anyone to join one. It made it legal again, in Michigan's private sector, for an employer and a union to negotiate a clause requiring covered workers to pay a fee. Whether any particular contract contains such a clause depends on bargaining.

Before Michigan, the most recent repeal had been Indiana's in 1965. Indiana, notably, re-adopted right-to-work in 2012, which is a reminder that these laws can swing back and forth with political control.

The strongest arguments on each side

Here is the case each side makes at its best.

The case for right-to-work. Supporters see the issue as one of freedom of association. Joining a group, they argue, should be voluntary, and paying a group is a form of association. If a union delivers value, workers will pay voluntarily; if it does not, they should not be compelled to. Some supporters also make a business-climate argument, holding that right-to-work signals a state where labor costs are predictable and strikes are rare, which matters to companies deciding where to build. Some economists find that right-to-work states have seen faster growth in employment and population in recent decades.

The case against. Opponents start with the duty of fair representation. Because federal law requires a union to represent every worker in the unit, a non-paying worker is not simply opting out of a club; he is receiving a service the union is legally required to provide, at the cost of the workers who do pay. That is the free-rider problem, and it gradually drains a union's resources and bargaining power. Opponents also argue that the growth in right-to-work states reflects many other factors, such as lower land costs, warm weather, tax policy and the long shift of population to the Sun Belt, and that studies controlling for those factors often find right-to-work associated with lower wages and lower rates of employer-provided benefits.

Here's where the honest reader should land, at least in our view: the evidence on jobs is genuinely contested, and both sides overstate it. The evidence on union strength is much less contested. Right-to-work laws reduce union membership and resources, which is why both supporters and opponents care so much. The real argument is about whether weaker unions are a good thing.

What changed for workers

It is still early to measure the repeal's effects with confidence, and anyone who tells you precisely how many jobs it created or lost is guessing. A few changes are clear. Private-sector unions in Michigan can again negotiate fee requirements when contracts come up for renewal. Unions that had spent years persuading individual workers to keep paying can redirect some of that energy toward organizing and bargaining. The state's political signal also changed: a large industrial state demonstrated that right-to-work is reversible.

The repeal has not produced a wave of copycats. Most right-to-work states have Republican legislatures, and in states like New Hampshire, where right-to-work bills have been introduced repeatedly, the legislature has repeatedly voted them down. The map, in other words, is mostly frozen, with Michigan as the one notable recent change.

There is also a national dimension. The PRO Act, which passed the U.S. House in 2020 and 2021 but stalled in the Senate, would override state right-to-work laws for private-sector workers by allowing contracts with fee requirements everywhere. Whether a future Congress takes it up, and whether it could survive the Senate, is unknown. Follow the votes that matter on our Congress page.

What the repeal did not change

It helps to be precise about the limits of the repeal, because both supporters and opponents sometimes overstate it.

Nobody in Michigan can be required to become a union member. That was true before right-to-work and remains true after it, under federal law. The most a contract can require is payment of a fee.

Workers who pay a fee but object to the union's political spending still have the right to pay only for the costs of representation. The Supreme Court established that principle for private-sector workers covered by the National Labor Relations Act in Communications Workers of America v. Beck in 1988, and it applies in every state with or without right-to-work.

Public employees in Michigan, as everywhere, remain under the Supreme Court's 2018 Janus ruling, which forbids requiring government workers to pay any fee to a union they have not joined. A state legislature cannot undo a constitutional ruling by repealing a statute.

And contracts change slowly. A fee clause exists only if the union negotiates one, and many contracts run three to five years. The practical effect of the repeal is spread across the years as agreements come up for renewal.

How to read the competing studies

Because the jobs evidence is so contested, readers will meet confident claims on both sides. A few questions help sort them.

Does the study compare similar places? States that adopted right-to-work early, mostly in the South, differ from Michigan in climate, history, industry and race relations. A study that compares Texas to New York is mostly measuring those differences. Better studies compare neighbouring counties on either side of a state line, or track the same state before and after a change.

Does it measure wages as well as jobs? A state can add jobs while wages stay low, and boosters tend to cite one number while opponents cite the other.

Does it account for cost of living? Lower wages in some right-to-work states partly reflect lower prices. Careful work adjusts for that.

Who paid for it? Advocacy groups on both sides fund research. That does not make the research wrong, but it is a reason to check whether independent economists reached similar conclusions.

Lessons for progressives

Michigan's repeal offers lessons beyond labor law.

First, state power matters. Labor's biggest legal win in decades did not come from Washington. It came from a state legislature that changed hands because of fair maps, high turnout and candidates who campaigned on issues voters cared about. Progressives who focus only on federal races miss where many of these fights are decided.

Second, wins can be fragile. Indiana's history shows that a repeal can be reversed by a future legislature. Building durable support among workers, including those who are not union members, is the only protection against a future swing.

Third, persuasion matters more than slogans. The phrase "right to work" is effective precisely because it sounds like something no one could oppose. Michigan unions did not win the repeal by out-sloganeering their opponents. They won by electing a legislature that had promised to repeal it, and by explaining the free-rider problem in concrete terms: you would not expect a neighbour to use your snowplough every winter without chipping in for fuel. The analogy is imperfect, as all analogies are, but it gets closer to the mechanism than a slogan does.

Finally, there is respect owed to the workers who do not want to pay. Many are not anti-union ideologues. Some have had bad experiences with a local; some are stretched thin; some simply never saw the union do anything for them. A labor movement that answers them with contempt will lose. One that earns their dues by visibly delivering for them will not need a law to collect it, though it may well deserve one.

A last thought on the people at the centre of this fight. The nurses, autoworkers, electricians and grocery clerks who rallied in Lansing in both 2012 and 2023 were not arguing about an abstraction. They were arguing about whether the organization that negotiates their raises and defends them when a supervisor goes too far can pay its bills. Whatever side a reader takes, that is the practical question a right-to-work law answers.

What you can do

Whether you live in a right-to-work state or not, these rules are set by elected officials you can reach.

• See the bigger picture of labor in your state. The labor page shows union membership over time and the newest union elections counted by the National Labor Relations Board. Compare your state's trend with Michigan's.
• Ask your state legislators where they stand. Right-to-work is a state law. Use the representatives lookup to find your state legislators and their contact forms, and ask whether they would support adopting or repealing it.
• Follow the state fights. Our workers and unions topic page collects coverage of right-to-work bills, repeals and the campaigns around them.
• Get involved in the races that decide these laws. Michigan's repeal came from state legislative elections. Check your state's registration deadlines and voting options on the vote page, and help a neighbour do the same.