Reporting on Indiana Republicans' push for a so-called right to work law, the New York Times' Steven Greenhouse lays out some of the outcomes of such laws:
Henry Farber, a labor economist at Princeton, said right-to-work laws, by allowing “free riders,” shrink union treasuries. One study found that the portion of free riders in right-to-work states ranged from 9 percent in Georgia to 39 percent in South Dakota.
Dean Baker bluntly describes the outcome of that fact, saying that as it "requires workers who support a union to pay extra money to support the cost of representing workers who don't want to pay for their representation," it basically constitutes a tax on union supporters.
"Join a union and pay to represent your coworkers who don't support the union or your fight to join it" is a tough pitch. That helps explain why, as Greenhouse continues:
In another study, David T. Ellwood, the dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Glenn A. Fine, a former Justice Department official, found that in the five years after states enacted such legislation, the number of unionization drives dropped by 28 percent, and in the following five years by an added 12 percent. Organizing wins fell by 46 percent in the first five years and 30 percent the next five. Over all, they found, right-to-work laws, beyond other factors, caused union membership to drop 5 percent to 10 percent.
Which is exactly mission accomplished for the people who push these laws. It's not about getting anyone any jobs. It's about keeping them out of unions, keeping them from joining together and finding strength in numbers as they bargain for better wages and more rights on the job. More than that, it's about turning workers against each other by forcing union supporters to carry free riders along with them as the price for union membership.