5 Signs Scott Walker Is Using GOP’s Racist 'Southern Strategy' to Win in 2016 | Alternet
"The legacy of “right to work” laws reaches back to the 1930s, when white supremacists like oil lobbyist Vance Muse initially pioneered the concept to divide and eliminate unions. Muse formed the Christian American Alliance to spread the combined gospel of racism and anti-unionism, pushing the “right-to-work” notion and developing alliances with like-minded groups including the Ku Klux Klan. Muse concluded that the only solution for maintaining segregation was to make union membership or any payment of union dues or fees voluntary. Without such laws, whites would be “forced” to mingle with blacks, although there had been many interracial unions over previous decades.
Crude as it was, Muse’s segregationist argument intersected perfectly with the mentality of corporate managers committed to holding down wages. They recognized that Muse’s “right-to-work” concept would serve to break up unified worker efforts to claim therights granted under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Some major corporations directly fused the segregationist and anti-union appeals."
