State of the unions - getting weaker If there is one thing more antiquated than America's 18th century constitution, it is its 20th century labour laws. The protections for collective bargaining introduced by the Wagner Act in 1935 are mostly intact, even if they have been reformed over the years. But the trade union movement is in a hangdog state. Democrats in the Obama era have made the revival of organised labour an urgent part of their strategy. This week, it backfired terribly. Barack Obama won the state of Michigan by 10 percentage points but a referendum to put collective bargaining rights into the state constitution could barely scrape 40 per cent of the vote. It was a shocking result because Michigan has long been a labour stronghold. The state's Republicans took it as a mandate. This week they passed a "right-to-work" law. Non-union workers in union-organised shops will no longer have to pay dues. This could create a funding crisis for Democratic organisers in Michigan. It certainly marks a shift in the US political landscape. Michigan is the 24th state to pass a right-to-work law; a majority of workers now live in right-to-work states. During the 1970s a quarter of US workers were unionised. Now the figure is roughly half that and most of them work for the government. This is the result of a natural attrition, not of any concerted programme of "union-busting." Private-sector unions have had the reverse Midas touch: everything they touch turns to lay-offs. Union pensions and benefits would have killed the Michigan-based automobile industry had not Mr Obama and George W. Bush, his predecessor, bailed it out. The only robust US unions today are the ones protected politically, and almost all unions are an arm of the Democratic party. The "bosses" they "bargain" with are allies. When Mr Obama complained that right-to-work laws "have everything to do with politics," he was making a point that none of his adversaries would gainsay. Weakening the power of unions is unlikely to hurt the economy of Michigan, which has been a basket case over recent decades. Dozens of European and Asian vehicle manufacturers have opened plants in the US but they have stayed away from Michigan, despite the concentration of expertise there. The bravado of the state's unions is a likely explanation. Unlike Britain in the 1970s, the US never had a moment when voters asked themselves whether they ruled the country or the unions did. But US unions often left the impression that they were using their control of choke-points in the economy - trash collectors, air traffic controllers - to hold the US to ransom. For now, Republicans have a victory but they would be hasty to draw too many conclusions. John Kasich, Ohio's Republican governor, saw his 2011 labour law reforms repudiated months later in a referendum as lopsided as the one just held in Michigan. The innovations in Michigan's law are more philosophical than partisan. It holds that "strikes and lockouts and other forms of industrial strife, regardless of where the merits of the controversy lie, are forces productive ultimately of economic waste." This is the opposite of the philosophy proclaimed in the Wagner Act and even in the conservative Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which amended it. The view then was that giving workers the right to strike helped stabilise the workplace. Almost certainly this view was erroneous. But where there is a right to organise, there is a right to strike. You cannot have freedom to organise without strikes, any more than you can have freedom of speech without disagreements. But that is what Michigan's new law envisions, whether out of cynicism or naivety. It gives employees the right to "negotiate or bargain collectively with their employers through representatives of their own free choice" - but also the right to "refrain from any or all" of those activities. You cannot have both. Whether you like labour unions or not, they do not come with opt-out clauses. They are effective because they deny employers the right to divide and conquer unionised workers. The catastrophic labour market situation in Spain is a sign that unionised workers" gains ultimately come at the expense of non-unionised workers. Craig Becker, a lawyer for the AFL-CIO union federation, told the New York Times this week: "You can't be in favour of collective bargaining . . . and still support right-to-work legislation." He sounded heartbroken over the new law but even those who are elated about it ought to agree with him. Some defenders of right-to-work say they don't oppose unions, only the freedom-constraining force that they have become. This is illogical. The weapon unions wield against bosses is a government-sanctioned monopoly control over a corner of the labour market. To break this monopoly is to break their power altogether.