For an opposing viewpoint, see this commentary by state Sen. Jennifer Carroll Foy.
Until then-Gov. Bill Tuck signed Virginia’s Right-to-Work law in 1947, employees across the commonwealth could be fired simply for refusing to join and bankroll a union they personally didn’t want, and had never asked for.
This injustice, authorized across the U.S. under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, was especially galling for African American workers. As the late longtime NAACP Labor Director Herbert Hill showed in his 1977 book Black Labor and the American Legal System: Race, Work, and the Law, white union officials often exploited key provisions in the NLRA to force black employees to join and bankroll segregated “Jim Crow” auxiliary locals, or be fired.
Having no business agents of their own, auxiliary locals had to rely entirely on the “services” of their “supervising” white local. Not surprisingly, the puppet “Negro auxiliaries” that the NLRA forced black workers to join and support as a job condition were in no position to defend their workplace interests.
Top officials of a number of large national unions, such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), completely excluded African American workers from membership in their locals. By making union membership mandatory as a job condition, the NLRA “absolutely shut out of employment” black employees who were barred from joining the union overseeing their field of work, exactly as then-NAACP Assistant Secretary Roy Wilkins had predicted it would in 1934, before the legislation was adopted.
The passage of Virginia’s Right-to-Work law was consequently a significant, albeit far from comprehensive, step forward for the commonwealth’s African American employees. Under this law, they could no longer be forced to join and bankroll puppet “Negro auxiliaries” that were never intended to defend their interests. And they could no longer be denied a job because they didn’t belong to a union they weren’t allowed to join. Texas union bigwig Harry Acreman cited these very grounds in opposing Right-to-Work in his state at around the same time, warning that it would “end segregation in southern workplaces.”
These are all undeniable facts. But Big Labor politicians in Virginia today are desperately trying to fabricate an alternative history as they gear up for an effort in early 2026 to obliterate the Old Dominion’s Right-to-Work law.
An especially egregious case in point is state Sen. Jennifer Carroll Foy, D-Prince William County, who on November 17 introduced legislation that would repeal Right-to-Work protections and reinstate forced union dues and fees.
Carroll Foy preposterously claims Virginia’s Right-to-Work law was “put in place to keep Black workers from joining unions,” when the reality is that, at the time this law was adopted, it was anti-Right-to-Work Big Labor bosses who were barring African American workers from joining unions. To the extent they were properly enforced, Right-to-Work laws in Virginia and elsewhere actually prevented union bosses from exploiting whites-only union membership rules to deny black employees the opportunity to compete for good jobs!
Carroll Foy spins fables about the current impact of forced unionism as well as about its history. As even Harvard economist Richard Freeman, arguably the leading academic apologist for monopolistic unionism in the U.S., has acknowledged, union bosses’ goal is to “remove[e] performance judgments as a factor in determining individual employees’ pay,” and they have been remarkably successful in achieving that goal. But Carroll Foy claims, contrary to what scholars like Freeman have found again and again, that so-called “exclusive union representation is “the way you can get equal pay for equal work”!
Why is it that the Virginia politician who is now leading the charge for Right-to-Work destruction evidently has to resort to making things up in order to justify her crusade? Perhaps because the actual facts show Right-to-Work is overwhelmingly popular with the commonwealth’s citizens, and states with such laws typically enjoy far faster employment growth and substantially higher cost-of-living-adjusted disposable incomes than forced-dues states.
Politicians like Ms. Carroll Foy are entitled to take any position they choose. But it shouldn’t be too much to ask her to refrain from resorting to phony pretexts to justify her stance.
* * *
Greer is the senior research associate with the National Institute for Labor Relations Research. Nothing in this commentary is intended to promote the defeat or the passage of any Virginia legislation.