Portside

Despite all the happy talk about workers’ freedom to choose and the potential for economic growth, Michigan’s new right-to-work law is mainly about stripping the power of labor unions in the state.

But the future of labor muscle in Michigan is being tested more than 900 miles away in Canton, Miss.

That’s where the United Auto Workers union is locked in a heated battle to organize 5,200 workers at a huge Nissan plant that builds 450,000 vehicles a year.

UAW President Bob King has staked the union’s future on its ability to organize the southern plants of foreign automakers, something his predecessors repeatedly tried, and failed, to accomplish.

Kristin Dziczek, director of the labor and industry group at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, told the New York Times that if King fails this time, the nonunion plants in the South will pull down wages at the Detroit Three.

“Unless they unionize more of the automotive work force in the country, they will become wage takers, not wage setters,” she said.

The UAW’s organizing drive also is shining a spotlight on Mississippi’s long-held right-to-work law, which is enshrined in the state constitution.

Business leaders and elected officials in the state see right to work as a key element in Mississippi’s success in capturing investment from Nissan, Toyota and numerous auto suppliers.

Nissan, which built its Canton plant a decade ago, has become Mississippi’s second-largest private-sector employer. The state’s business leaders say Mississippi’s economic competitiveness will suffer a blow if the UAW succeeds in organizing the plant.

“The nonunion environment has been a market edge in Southern states. But if you start seeing that change, it will certainly be a loss for the region,” Blake Wilson, president of the Mississippi Economic Council—the state’s chamber of commerce—told the Times.

The base wage for most workers at the plant is $23.22 an hour, according to the Times. That’s $928.80 for a 40-hour week, $232.80 a week above the average wage in Mississippi.

But right to work hasn’t boosted the economic well-being of Mississippi residents compared to citizens in the rest of the country.

Mississippi, which enacted right to work in 1954, ranked 50th among the states in per capita income last year, as it has in all but two years since 1990. It ranked 49th in 2005 and 2007.

And as the Economic Policy Institute pointed out last week, Mississippi has the highest poverty rate and the lowest school test scores in the country.

Gov. Rick Snyder has vowed in a television ad now running that Michigan “will never be 50th out of 50 again,” an imprecise reference to the state’s poor economic performance of the past decade.

To avoid that catastrophe, the state should steer clear of Mississippi’s policies.