For some strange reason, the meter of the headline (first used by the Wisconsin Club for Growth) matches …

M.D. Kittle reports about a union leader who isn’t afraid of right to work:

Gary Casteel, secretary-treasurer of the United Auto Workers, said he prefers organizing in a right-to-work environment.

“This is something I’ve never understood, that people think right to work hurts unions,” Casteel said in February, according to a July 1 piece in the Washington Post. “To me, it helps them.”

The blog was written by the Post’s labor reporter Lydia DePillis, and headlined “Why Harris v. Quinn isn’t as bad for workers as it sounds.” The U.S. Supreme Court decision put the brakes on compulsory union dues for some home-care employees.

“You don’t have to belong if you don’t want to,” Casteel said. “So if I go to an organizing drive, I can tell these workers, ‘If you don’t like this arrangement, you don’t have to belong.’ Versus, ‘If we get 50 percent of you, then all of you have to belong, whether you like to or not.’ I don’t even like the way that sounds, because it’s a voluntary system, and if you don’t think the system’s earning its keep, then you don’t have to pay.”

Leave it to a big labor guy to crystallize the argument for right-to-work proponents.

Right-to-work laws, now in 24 states, including Michigan, Florida and Indiana, prohibit firing workers for choosing not to join a labor union or pay dues.

It’s about choice, and it’s about the free-market principles of competition, right-to-work backers say. Or as Casteel put it, if the union isn’t “earning it’s keep, then you don’t have to pay.” No more than a consumer would have to pay for one cable TV plan over another or any service deemed too costly or ineffective.

Casteel’s point, at least at the time, was that unions have and can continue to prove their worth to the worker. Fine, say right-to-work proponents, but let the employee ultimately say.

Public-sector employees have weighed in in Wisconsin, where the state’s Act 10 reformed the state’s long-standing and pioneering government collective-bargaining law. Given the choice, public employees by pretty significant numbers have left their unions and their compulsory dues.

The Wisconsin Education Association Council, lost more than a third of its membership, declining from about 98,000 to about 60,000 members following the implementation of the public-sector collective-bargaining reform Act 10 in 2011, according to the Wall Street Journal.

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 24’s dues-paying membership fell from about 5,900 security and safety employee members pre-Act 10 to 690 in the early months of 2013 — an 88 percent drop — according to information obtained by Wisconsin Reporter.

Michigan, the home of the UAW, is just beginning to find out about life after right-to-work. The state became a right-to-work state in 2013, following massive, big labor-led protests at the Capitol in Lansing in late December 2012.

Earlier this fall, the brunt of the 112,000 active educators and school workers in the state’s largest teachers union, the Michigan Education Association, were for the first time able to drop out of the union and stop paying union dues. Many have.

According to a new report out this week, MEA membership declined by more than 5,100 education employees, to 142,555, between Sept. 1, 2012, and Aug. 31, 2013.

The report, published in the Detroit Free Press, shows MEA dues rose $5 between 2013 and 2014. Still, the union reported a negative net asset total of nearly $135 million.

Despite the changes and challenges, one fact remained the same: MEA’s top bosses got another round of big raises.

MEA President Steven B. Cook’s gross salary climbed 11 percent, or $20,446, to $203,144, according to the report. Vice President Nancy Strachan booked a 16-percent raise, with her gross salary up $20,097, to $144,700. And Secretary-Treasurer Rick Trainor’s gross salary soared by $48,385, to $158,296.

Union membership in 2013 rose slightly overall, making up about 16 percent of workers in Michigan. But the jury still is out. UAW has existing contracts with the Detroit’s Big Three automakers until September 2015, when the new agreements will no longer allow compulsory union dues.

To quote a hysterical pro wrestling announcer: Wait just a minute!

You won’t find the UAW’s Casteel boldly talking about competing in right-to-work states much these days. He made his comments as director of UAW Region 8, representing a large swath of the South, including Tennessee, where he was engaged in a bitter battle to organize a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga.

Now, Casteel mainly talks about those “right-wing extremists” trying to break the backs of American organized labor by laws ending forced unionism.

couple months after Casteel was elected secretary-treasurer at the UAW’s 36th Constitutional Convention in Las Vegas, the union boss lamented how the big business-backed right “try to thwart workers’ efforts at every turn …”

“(W)hether it’s making it virtually impossible for unions to collect the resources they need to bargain (as Gov. Scott Walker did to state workers in Wisconsin) or passing dishonest right to work laws that pretend to uphold democracy, but in truth are just their attempt to pit workers against one another,” Casteel wrote in his “Clear View blog. “I’m sure they are not out of ideas, but I am equally sure that we are up to the task of exposing their agenda and building a stronger union through the process.”

The Washington Post asked the question that Casteel once answered: “So is it really such a terrible thing for unions to have to demonstrate their value convincingly enough for workers to want to join?”

About the media: Let’s hear from Mike Nichols, a member, like myself, of the Former Journal Communications Employees Club:

Many years ago, after taking a job as a young reporter at the old Milwaukee Journal, the union leaders in the newsroom — using tactics that were somewhere between cajoling and arm-twisting — tried to persuade me to join The Newspaper Guild, a union affiliate of the Communications Workers of America.

They were nice guys, my union friends. But it was clear they thought anyone who didn’t hand over some cash in the form of dues was a freeloader. Their argument: Because the paper was (and still is) a unionized “open shop,” employees didn’t have to pay dues if they didn’t want to. But because a majority of newsroom employees had once voted in favor of the union, the union leaders represented everyone.

Even if you don’t pay the union, you’ll still be part of the “bargaining unit,” the union leaders would argue. You’ll still “benefit” from the collective bargaining process. So pony up.

I declined for a variety of reasons. The union, I concluded, wasn’t boosting my pay. It was holding it down by repeatedly asking the company to spend whatever money was available on across-the-board salary increases rather than just merit pay; if I screwed up somehow, I wanted to speak for myself; if I was going to donate money to a cause (something reporters and columnists are normally dissuaded from doing) I didn’t want that cause to be part of a national union that pushed a political agenda I disagreed with.

I never did join the union. I also never stopped wondering how in the world union leaders had the right to represent me at the bargaining table if I didn’t want them to.

The answer might surprise some people and shed some light on just what right-to-work legislation would mean for workers in this state — and what it wouldn’t.

Right-to-work legislation would have absolutely no impact on so-called “open shops” such as the one in the Journal Sentinel newsroom, according to Fred Gants, a Madison labor and employment lawyer for Quarles and Brady.

Right-to-work legislation, according to Gants, would only prevent companies and unions from setting up “union” shops, also sometimes referred to as “agency shops”— places where employees must pay union dues (at least that portion of dues that is not spent on political causes or lobbying) as a condition of employment.

In other words, even if right-to-work legislation is adopted, Wisconsin workers will still be able to form and join unions if they so choose. And under federal law, once a union is formed, it would still bargain on behalf of its non-union co-workers. The only difference: Nobody could be forced to pay dues. All union shops would become open.

The burgeoning debate over right-to-work is really over two different things: the rights that workers, either as individuals or collectively, should have in the workplace; and whether right-to-work states are more conducive or less conducive to long-term prosperity.

Long before specific legislation has even been introduced, my old friends on the Editorial Board at the paper have already stated that they “don’t think workplace freedom is the real objective here” and that Wisconsin should “forget this sideshow.”

Sidestepping the issue of individual rights, they’ve cherry-picked old studies that have nothing to do with Wisconsin, and seem to have determined there is no link between right-to-work laws and economic growth. In truth, there are reputable studies that conclude such laws have been economically advantageous. Because various studies conflict in some ways, because times change and because Wisconsin is a very unique place, there is a need to seriously examine the specific impact a right-to-work law might have here in the Badger State at this particular point in history.

Right-to-work laws have been adopted in Michigan and Indiana as well as about half of the other states in America. Is Wisconsin right now at a competitive disadvantage?

Do Wisconsinites see this as an economic issue, an issue of individual rights, or both?

The only thing that would have bothered me more than being forced into the bargaining unit would have been being forced to pay dues. Many people in Wisconsin’s newsrooms clearly disagree. But all that really matters is what everyone else in the state thinks, and whether right-to-work laws are good for both Wisconsin as a whole as well as its individual citizens.

Any worker who understands the concept of self-interest would, you would think, want the best possible deal for himself or herself, irrespective of what his or her coworkers get. Any worker with self-respect would, you would think, want to be judged and rewarded based on his or her own work and value to the company, not a collective everybody-gets-X arrangement you get from a union.