MARK KIESLING: Right-to-work puts politics over practicality

That pesky right-to-work bill just won't seem to go away. I'm not sure I know why, but I have a hunch.

My guess is that it is political, a chance for new Republican majorities in both chambers of the Indiana General Assembly to exercise their rights to bare their arms and flex their muscles.

Right-to-work legislation, just to clarify, says that even when an employee enters a closed union shop he or she would not have to join the union but would be entitled to any benefits the unions won.

Obviously this begs the question of why anyone in a right-to-work state, which are mostly in the South, would join a union. You can get a book at the library for free, but don't try that at Barnes & Noble unless you are looking for a free trip in a squad car.

There is no doubt that unions have abused their power during the past century. They traded on their legacy of getting vacations for workers, 40-hour work weeks and the abolition of child labor to become the mirror image of the capitalist fat cats they professed to despise.

But they lost a lot of their credibility by doing so. Union bosses became no more representatives of the working man or woman than the robber barons.

Yet there is something in the right-to-work movement that rings hollow.

Not atypically, the Republicans are coming down on the side of business and the Democrats on the side of labor. No shock there, we all understand.

Yet if this is just a power move by the new GOP majority, I think they've picked the wrong cause for which to go to the mat.

Why? Simply this. Indiana has been run for the past seven years by a Republican governor, Mitch Daniels. He has successfully brought new and high-paying businesses into Indiana during those years.

So the argument being put forth that right-to-work makes Indiana more attractive to business is almost a repudiation of Daniels' successes. Were he running again, which by law he cannot under term limits, I don't think he'd appreciate this at all.

In fact, he backed away from right-to-work last year when it first became such a hot button item and said there are more important things in Indiana to address.

Indiana's business climate is already business friendly, as I've said before. One needs only to compare Indiana's workers' compensation laws with those of, say, Illinois to see where the more amenable business climate lies.

Indiana's business climate already is attractive, as Daniels' success has shown. Are members of his own party now saying he could have done better?

Bet they wouldn't have said that to his face in an election year.

The opinions are solely those of the writer. He can be reached at mark.kiesling@nwi.com or (219) 933-4170.