Wv Senate Oks Right-to-work Clarification Bill

By Phil Kabler On a party-line 22-12 vote, the West Virginia Senate on Monday passed legislation to retroactively clean up ambiguous sections of the state's right-to-work law - a new law currently being challenged in Kanawha Circuit Court (SB 330). In obtaining a preliminary injunction against the law last summer, the state AFL-CIO and other labor unions primarily argued that the legislation is an illegal taking of union assets, since state and federal law requires unions to represent all employees in a union shop, including those who opt out of paying union dues under the law. However, the lawsuit also cites two sections of the law that are fuzzily written, one that would seem to exempt building and construction trade unions, and a definitions section that could be interpreted to apply the law to public-employee unions only. The bill removes those two provisions from what is known in state Code as the Workplace Freedom Act. On Monday, Sen.