John Murphy, a telecommunications worker with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, is tired of having to show up to protests every year to oppose right-to-work legislation in New Hampshire.
“Every year we come out, and it’s the same,” he said. “It’s the same legislation you backtrack into. It’s some out-of-state national right-to-work (organization) that keeps trying to introduce it into New Hampshire, and it’s voted down, Republican side, Democratic side. It’s bipartisan.”
Still, Murphy comes out every time because he believes right-to-work is bad policy for New Hampshire and he believes in unions. That’s what he was doing on Wednesday when he gathered alongside more than 100 others outside the Legislative Office Building near the State House to protest House Bill 238, the latest bill seeking to bring right-to-work policies to New Hampshire.
Murphy said the bill seems like “a waste of our legislators’ time” given how many times it’s failed before.
Right-to-work – which refers to policies that prohibit collective bargaining agreements from requiring employees to join or contribute to a union – has been a perennial debate among New Hampshire lawmakers, but for decades has continually failed to become law. Most recently, House Bill 1377 and Senate Bill 516 in 2024 sought to institute right-to-work policies in New Hampshire, but neither the House nor Senate approved the legislation.
However, after November’s election saw Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte win the governor’s race and a slate of new lawmakers earn spots in the Legislature, some on each side of the issue feel this year could be different. Indeed, in an interview with The New Hampshire Union-Leader last week, Ayotte said she’d sign a right-to-work bill if the Legislature sent it to her desk.
If right-to-work were to become law in New Hampshire, it would be the only New England state and one of 27 states across the U.S. with such a policy.
Pro-right-to-work advocates argue the policy would attract employers to the state and drive economic growth. Andrew Cline, president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a New Hampshire-based conservative think tank, argued in a recent report that a right-to-work law would be a way for the state to “improve the state’s manufacturing sector without spending a dime of taxpayer money.” He cites a 2021 Harvard University study that examined the economies of counties on the borders of right-to-work and non-right-to-work states and found that right-to-work regions have 1.6% higher employment and 1.4% higher labor force participation.
Unionized workers and union representatives argued Wednesday that right-to-work legislation harms workers’ leverage to negotiate higher wages through their union, empowers people who don’t pay into the union to reap the benefits of said union, and interferes with legal agreements made between workers and employers.
Data shows workers in right-to-work states make 3.2% less on average than their counterparts in similar positions in non-right-to-work states – $1,670 per year for a full-time worker – according to the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute. On job growth, the Economic Policy Institute draws a different conclusion from the Harvard study cited by Cline, saying there are “no measurable employment advantages between RTW and non-RTW states.”
John Perry, a staff representative for United Steelworkers in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont who attended the protest Wednesday, called HB 238 “an attack on labor.”
Scott Gove, a 36-year UPS driver represented by the Teamsters was another who braved the below-freezing weather to protest.
“The benefits and the pay that the Teamsters have negotiated on my behalf as a worker in the state of New Hampshire,” Gove said. “That’s what motivated me to be here today.”
Keith Judge, a former Teamsters member working for Associated Grocers of New England who now serves as a business agent for the union, noted that right-to-work states have lower wages and benefits and called the policy “just a ploy to take bargaining power away from the people.”
Judge, and others, also testified during a House Labor, Industrial, and Rehabilitative Services Committee hearing on the bill that took place immediately following the protest. He told the story of how he was diagnosed with cancer years ago and was able to get the best treatment possible because of the health care benefits his union negotiated.
“If it were not for my union and the benefits negotiated by Local 633 when I was a rank-and-file member, I physically would not be here,” he told lawmakers.
Members from several unions, including the Teamsters Union, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, National Education Association, Student Worker Collective at Dartmouth, and United Steelworkers, came to demonstrate and testify Wednesday morning against HB 238.
However, some proponents of the bill also spoke.
Greg Moore, the state director for the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, testified that the issue with the way unionization works today is that “if 50% plus one member of a bargaining committee decide to join a union, the minority lose all their rights.”
As Moore spoke, some members of the committee, several of whom have backgrounds working within unions, pushed back sharply.
“What you just described sounds like democracy,” Rep. Michael Cahill, a Democrat from Newmarket, said. “Are you opposed to democracy?”
Moore also said he knows of businesses that explicitly told him they’d move to New Hampshire if it became a right-to-work state.
Rep. Brian Sullivan, a Grantham Democrat, asked Moore for names of specific businesses that said they’d come. However, Moore declined to specify, claiming the businesses were not willing to be publicly identified until right-to-work actually becomes law.
John Kalb, vice president of the National Right to Work Committee, and John Reynolds, state director for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, both testified about what they saw as the economic benefits of right-to-work, specifically, that it would attract employers and that 80% of New Hampshire small-business owners support right-to-work – though in the state of New Hampshire, businesses with fewer than 10 employees legally cannot unionize.