Cedric De Leon Speaks on the Right to Work

Cedric de Leon from Providence College will give a PPE Talk on the topic “The Origins of Right to Work: Race, Class, Party and the Freedom of Contract” at Virginia Tech. The talk will take place on Wednesday, October 26, from 4-6 PM, in 223 Engel Hall. The talk is tailored to appeal to both students and faculty, with plenty of time for discussion and interaction with the guest speaker. You are cordially invited to attend.

Here is the abstract of the talk: “Right to work” states weaken collective bargaining rights and limit the ability of unions to effectively advocate on behalf of workers. As more and more states consider enacting right-to-work laws, observers trace the contemporary attack on organized labor to the 1980s and the Reagan era or the early 1950s and the immediate aftermath of the Taft-Hartley Act. In contrast, I argue that this antagonism began a century earlier with the Northern victory in the U.S. Civil War, when the political establishment revised the English common-law doctrine of conspiracy to equate collective bargaining with the enslavement of free white men.