Right-to-work laws are discussed on The Bob Zadek Show chiefly as an illustration of competition among American states rather than as a body of labor law examined on its own terms. Across the excerpts the phrase appears in three contexts: a dispute over the causes of Michigan’s job losses, a discussion of state tax and regulatory competition, and an analogy to how people might respond to differing state abortion laws after Dobbs. The excerpts supply no account of what such a law provides, when any was enacted, or how any was litigated.
Michigan, the auto bailout and the Southern states
The earliest treatment comes in a July 2011 episode with Don Boudreaux, identified by Bob Zadek as a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the blog Cafe Hayek. Zadek disputes former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm’s account of her state’s unemployment, saying she “totally misses the point” when she attributes job losses to work going overseas. In Zadek’s telling, the jobs were lost instead to Tennessee, Alabama and other Southern states that had right-to-work laws, and the number of jobs the auto industry lost was, in his word, de minimis. He frames the bailouts of GM and Chrysler as an effort to save union jobs rather than jobs, creating more union jobs at the expense of non-union ones The Second American Revolution – NOW (2011). Boudreaux’s reply does not take up right-to-work laws; he observes that he has never heard a politician accept blame for a policy, except for being a poor campaigner.
State competition and the Michigan statute
A March 2013 episode returns to Michigan. Zadek tells the audience that Michigan “just enacted a right-to-work statute,” which he says was done in response to competition from Southern states — though in the same sentence he describes those states as having “no right-to-work laws,” an apparent slip in the transcript. The remark comes as he presses the guest, Travis Brown, on how much governors and state legislatures feel the competition of other states, and how much of the activity is driven by political ambition, naming Bobby Jindal and Rick Perry as possible presidential candidates. Brown answers that Jindal’s plan, which he says he reviewed over several hours in joint legislative committees with the Department of Revenue, is serious and deliberate rather than a matter of headlines, and that the same is true of plans from Governors Brownback in Kansas, Walker in Wisconsin and Kasich in Ohio Where is Everyone Going? (2013). Zadek’s broader point in the segment is that state-level competition is healthy and that libertarian arguments about taxation can be demonstrated with data rather than asserted in the abstract; Brown promotes his book and app, How Money Walks, which reports county-level net gains and losses in adjusted gross income.
Federalism and state experimentation
Right-to-work laws reappear in an October 2017 episode introducing Robert Alt, described by Zadek as chief executive officer of the Buckeye Institute since 2012, founder of its Economic Research Center, and a former director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies who served under former US Attorney General Edwin Meese. Zadek opens by marking the publication of the first Federalist Paper, which he dates to 1788 and characterizes as persuasion rather than legislative history. He then lists right-to-work laws alongside marijuana reform, the rejection of Medicaid by some states and criminal justice reform as examples of the interesting legislative initiatives now happening at the state level rather than in Washington, which he calls ungovernable Robert Alt of the Buckeye Institute: Power to the States (2017). Alt agrees that meaningful reform cannot be achieved in Washington but can be achieved in the states. The episode’s discussion of right-to-work laws goes no further than their inclusion in that list.
Foot voting and the analogy to abortion
In a May 2022 episode on the draft Dobbs opinion, Zadek uses right-to-work laws as an analogy. Guest Evan Bernick, asked what abortion law would look like the morning after the draft became a majority decision, predicts a checkerboard, with Democratic states serving as sanctuaries for people traveling from states where abortion is banned, and with abortion laws becoming more severe in banning states and more permissive in supporting ones. Zadek then draws the comparison explicitly: many states have right-to-work laws where, in his phrasing, “you cannot have compulsory unionization,” while other states do not, and employers and workers move or stay based on which state is more hospitable to their activity. He extends the same logic to state minimum wage laws, gun control and concealed carry Evan Bernick on the Dobbs Draft (2022). He notes that the analogy breaks down where the Constitution is argued to speak — as he says Heller has told us it does on guns — and not on abortion. Bernick adds that the ability to travel will depend on resources, and that reliance on the ability to terminate a pregnancy within the first trimester in any state is a factor Dobbs considers in deciding whether to overrule Roe.
Across episodes: no development
Four episodes touch the topic — The Second American Revolution – NOW (2011), Where is Everyone Going? (2013), Robert Alt of the Buckeye Institute: Power to the States (2017) and Evan Bernick on the Dobbs Draft (2022) — and the excerpts show no development in the treatment: right-to-work laws function throughout as a stock example of states differing from one another and of people and businesses responding by moving, with no episode examining the laws themselves.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state what a right-to-work law provides beyond Zadek’s phrase about compulsory unionization, nor when or under what authority any such law was enacted. They name no statute, no bill, no case and no constitutional provision bearing on the subject. The only enactment mentioned is Michigan’s, described in a single sentence in 2013, and the only states named as having such laws are the Southern states referred to collectively in 2011. No guest in these excerpts offers a sustained argument for or against the laws.