A suggestion at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference sounds like a spoof, but party activist Greg McNeilly is serious.
"Every worker needs freedom," GOP consultant Greg McNeilly tells party leaders on Mackinac Island.
Right-to-work provisions of state law should cover lawyers so they needn’t pay $300 a year to join the state Bar of Michigan, the Free Press quotes him as saying.
McNeilly, head of the Michigan Freedom Fund which was a strong advocate for right-to-work laws that passed the Legislature in December, said he is talking with possible sponsors of a bill that would repeal requirements that lawyers join the state bar in order to be able to practice law in the state.
“Every worker needs freedom,” he said. “You come out of law school with $100,000 in debt and then you’re forced to pay a union due with no benefit. Why?”
McNeilly's "proposal came during a panel discussion of the right-to-work law during the Michigan Republican Leadership Conference on Mackinac Island," writes Kathleen Gray of the paper's Lansing bureau.
Michigan's roughly 40,000 practicing attorneys must belong to the bar association. Membership has been required since 1935, Gray notes.
Janet Welch, executive director of the group, tells the paper:
"The State Bar’s status is not related to ‘right to work’ laws. The State Bar is a professional association; it is not the employer of the lawyers of Michigan."
Right-to-work makes it illegal to require payment of union dues as an employment condition. Thousands of union members protested the legislation at the state Capitol last last year.
