The Indiana Right-to-Work Law

Abstract

For the past decade the right-to-work controversy has been waged primarily at the state level. Undoubtedly, this dispute will remain a problem for the states for many more years, as it is entirely unlikely that Congress will either enact a national right-to-work law or eliminate Section 14(b) from the Taft Hartley Act, which provides the states with the authority to enact statutes prohibiting all forms of union security within their political jurisdiction. Since it appears almost a certainty that the states wilt continue to contend with the right-to-work problem, there is a need for continuing study of all aspects of such legislation. Perhaps no issue of labor relations law has created more controversy and attracted more public attention, as evidenced by the great amount of literature which deals with the merits of right-to-work legislation. Rather than retreading this familiar ground, this article has as its major objective a presentation of the case history of the passage of the Indiana right-to-work law. Enactment of this law in 1957 attracted particular attention because Indiana was the first industrial state to have passed such legislation. This study seeks to present and analyze the character of the political atmosphere in which the Indiana law was enacted, the experience of the bill on the legislative treadmill, the forces which played a part in its passage, the role of the Governor of the state relative to the legislation, and whatever empirical data are available dealing with the law's operation to date. Also, some consideration is given to the significance of the Indiana experience to other industrial states. (Author's abstract courtesy EBSCO.)

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.