[Jeliza-Rose]

http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/right-to-work

In 1936, Vance Muse, an oil industry lobbyist from Houston Texas, founded the Christian American Association with backing from Southern oil companies and industrialists from the Northeast.

Big business in America regarded the rest of the population and its labor pool much the same way colonial powers viewed the local Natives — as inherently hostile, alien savages whose only purpose was to enrich their masters, and who must not be given even the slightest concessions, such as child labor laws, lest it put ideas in their heads about "rights".
To big business plutocrats, the New Deal labor laws represented a sort of political Holocaust that they never forgot or forgave. They lost their full spectrum political dominance over their workers and over the political and judicial direction of the country, and all that essentially because FDR brought to an end America’s "open shop" culture and empowered unions with "closed shop" union security.

Martin Luther King, Jr. saw an alliance with labor as crucial to advancing civil rights as well as economic justice for all workers, he spoke out against right-to-work laws in 1961...

"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights."

[Soixante-Retard]

I think you are barking up the wrong tree here. Apartheid in South Africa was partly a result of non existence of "right-to-work" laws. You either hired a white union member or hired a black non-union member and hope you didn't get caught. See here.

[Jeliza-Rose]

"In 1936, Vance Muse incorporated in Texas another union-busting outfit called the "Christian American Association" which was closely associated with the Texas Ku Klux Klan as well as the American Legion, a far-right veterans’ group used to bust up unions and terrorize minorities and suspected Communists. It was this same Christian American Association which launched the "right to work" anti-union campaign using that very same euphemism."

[Soixante-Retard]

I think the author Mark Ames is clutching at straws to imply that "right-to-work" laws are similar to "bust[ing] up unions and terrorizing minorities". He is clearly make an association fallacy here. It makes it much easier, I imagine in his eyes, to not address "right-to-work" laws and instead just offer some, quite frankly, useless associations to dismiss the issue.

[Doug64]

We could just as easily talk about the eugenics origins of abortion on demand, or the racist origins of gun control laws. Even if true, what does any of that have to do with the situation today?