Actually I don’t think it’s so much that the union members don’t want to have to work alongside non-members, so much as that they think non-union people should be prohibited from earning a living at all.

They don’t mind so much non-unionists earning a living as long as they get the same cut as they get from their members.

The second claim is really stupid.

The first claim is absolutely true.

“Right to work” laws eliminate freedom of contract between employers and unions, and require unions to represent non-union-members as if they were union members. They’re just as bad as the “closed shop” provisions of the National Labor Relations Act.

Right to work doesn’t stop employers from negotiating contracts with unions, common sense does.

At the factory where I worked, it was the company which had insisted the workers choose a union (when the factory opened, long before I worked there).

The company wanted one agent to bargain with, uniform rules, and low turnover. It got all three. And once NAFTA allowed its products to move across the Canadian and Mexican borders freely, it closed its non-union factories in those countries and put its production entirely in the union plant.

The union I belonged to didn’t claim to offer worker training (I know that some, like IBEW, do that).

Its main effect, so far as I could tell — and I had something of a “control” for the experiment with a nearby company of similar size, with similar products, and a similar pay scale for the express purpose of keeping themselves non-union — was huge turnover reduction in a work force where many of the jobs required weeks or months of training to become reasonably competent at.

In any case, the point is this:

There shouldn’t be laws that say “if x% of the workers vote for a union, the employer has to contract with the union, and must do so exclusively (‘closed shop’).”

Nor should there be laws that say “employers are forbidden to contract exclusively with unions, and unions are required to represent non-members as if they were members (‘right to work’).”

Both of those kinds of laws are BS with no place in a free society.

All the construction unions except maybe the laborers have classes after work hours.
What exactly is the in between of Right to work and closed shops?

Heh, yeah.  This is my dad’s old union — they’ve been corrupt as hell since at least the 70s.
The union bigshots are the ones drafting this; not the members (although, some of the jobs the rank and file do could certainly stand to have some sort of mediation in place with management…some dirty, dangerous jobs there…not that the union does a damn thing to improve the working conditions for the rank and file.  The stories I could tell).
And that’s the problem: some jobs, the workers do need some sort of protection from the management (I’ve worked them — and non-union too — the stories I could tell there as well).  However, eventually every union becomes corrupt…then the workers probably need some sort of mediation between them and their damn union (been down that road too — the stories I could tell).
And with this economy the way it is actual workers don’t stand a chance.

There is actually some truth in this, but not from any sort of bigotry:

The non-union job I held was pretty bad in regards to hiring illegals — as long as they had a SS (stolen) and some form of ID (faked), they turned a blind eye.  The reasons were many — the company knew those guys were illegal (or had a pretty good guess…all of them had exactly 10 kids — one of them told me it had something to do with tax exemptions, welfare, and avoiding INS scrutiny; he was very pleasant and forthright about it too, right in front of our manager even — and questionably sketchy work histories); they used this unspoken knowledge to work the bejesus out of them.  Wasn’t as though those guys were going to go complaining about their work hours or conditions.

This was an understandably sore point with the actual citizens working there — again, for a lot of reasons.

 ”Okay, the n*****s and the Chinks can stay – but NO IRISH!”