Twenty-five New Hampshire House Republicans joined with Democrats on Thursday to defeat the latest effort to pass ‘right-to-work’ legislation. Some of the Republicans who opposed the measure urged fellow members of their party to recall President Donald Trump’s efforts to appeal to union workers during the 2024 presidential campaign.
“You cannot make America great without American workers. Period,” Rep. Stephen Pearson, a Republican from Derry, told colleagues during debate on the measure.
“It is time for New Hampshire to look forward, solve actual problems the voters care about, and end this pointless attack on working families,” Pearson added.
Right-to-work policies prohibit private sector unions from charging non-members a fee to cover the cost of collective bargaining negotiations. The issue has become an annual debate in the State House stretching back decades, with versions of the bill previously clearing one or both chambers of the Legislature, before facing vetoes.
This time around, the legislation failed in the New Hampshire House on a 200-180 vote. Lawmakers also used a procedural method to prohibit the bill from returning for a vote next year, effectively ending the policy’s chances of becoming law until after the next elections in 2026.
In 2018, a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent by ending the collection of collective bargaining-related fees from non-members of public sector unions.
Twenty-seven states currently have right-to-work laws on the books for private sector unions, though there are no states in the northeast with the policy.
Fewer than 10% of all private sector employees in New Hampshire are currently members of a union, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Supporters of right-to-work legislation argue that employees should have the freedom to choose if they want to pay union fees, and that it would signal to companies that New Hampshire is business-friendly.
“This bill is not anti-union. It is pro-worker,” said Rep. Jim Creighton, a Republican from Antrim. He said the measure is “vital to fair employment practices.”
Opponents argue that right-to-work laws create a problem known as free-riding: workers who don’t chip in to cover the costs of collective bargaining still get the benefits of higher wages gained through often lengthy and complex negotiations. Many union members also argue the laws are thinly veiled attempts to weaken their power.
Rep. Daniel LeClerc, a Democrat from Amherst who serves on the House’s Labor, Industrial and Rehabilitative Committee, said he heard more than five hours of testimony during a public hearing on the proposal last week, with the vast majority of speakers opposed to the bill.
LeClerc, a member of a construction union, told his House colleagues on Thursday that right-to-work laws would allow the government to “get between a business owner and their employees.”
Labor unions rallied supporters outside of the State House before the vote and could be heard erupting in cheers from the gallery after the measure failed.
