The father of work-for-less laws?

Life's events can scar a person forever. For some of us, every holiday - which should be a joy - dredges up bad memories of past mistakes.

But since this is Labor Day weekend, let me tell you the story of how the late Bill Tuck left a scar on America's economic life.

The state of Virginia has an official religion: so-called "right-to-work" laws. Prevalent in the South and West, I call them work-for-less laws, as they force workers to subsidize cheap, nonunion labor. The current Virginia gubernatorial race is hamstrung at the work-for-less altar.

These despotic statutes were authorized by the federal Taft-Hartley Act.

William M. Tuck was Governor of Virginia from 1946 to 1950. Tuck was a cigar-chomping segregationist who tried to have Harry Truman (who he compared to Stalin) removed from the presidential ballot in Virginia. Bill Tuck is said to have resembled Boss Hogg without the charm.

Tuck sponsored a work-for-less law, which made Virginia one of the very first states with such a brutal rule. Taft-Hartley was passed largely at Tuck's encouragement - following his public tantrum against the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

IBEW had gone on strike against Virginia Electric and Power Company. Workers wanted a wage increase of only 17 cents an hour, which VEPCO refused.

Tuck vowed "unshirted hell" for the workers. When the union refused to cancel the strike, Tuck promptly drafted them into the state militia. If the strike happened, these workers would be ordered to perform work at the very company they were on strike against. Tuck also threatened to court-martial the workers.

Tuck's demand was illegal then as it would be now. Legally and morally, the right of workers to strike is as ironclad as any other right. But this bullying forced IBEW to give up.

In American life today, the well has been poisoned by so many factors for so long that it's miraculous that some of us have ever recovered as much as we have from past tragedies. But the continuing ravages of misnamed "right-to-work" laws have slowed progress dearly.