We’re all liars. Yes, even you.

Why do people lie?

When I asked friends and acquaintances to reveal which lies they tell most frequently, I figured I’d get a lot of joke answers and a few admissions of ego-boosting falsehoods. Instead, what was supposed to be a light-hearted week-long survey became an unexpected lesson in human nature, empathy, and the secrets we all share — however unwittingly.

I was inspired to embark on this journey because science had not fulfilled my curiosity. After an afternoon of Googling, I found surprisingly few clinical studies about how and why people lie. In fact, the most relevant study was conducted way back in 2002, by a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts.

Here what you need to know about that 15-year-old study: Dr. Robert S. Feldman secretly filmed conversations between nearly 250 undergraduate students, finding that 60% of the participants lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation. Those liars dished out an average of two to three fibs per chat. Women in the study “were more likely to lie to make the person they were talking to feel good,” while men most frequently fibbed “to make themselves look better.”

So, not exactly groundbreaking work. The results sound a bit like a cold breakdown of a bad 90s dating advice book. Hoping to paint a broader picture of people’s motivations for bending the truth, I decided to ask my own friends and acquaintances: What lie do you tell most frequently? And why do you tell it?

I posted my query on Facebook. The first response came from my college roommate–still one of my best friends. “I tell people that I went to Coachella, but I’ve never been,” Malaka wrote. “It’s easier than them reacting, ‘OMG you lived in Los Angeles and YOU NEVER WENT TO COACHELLA!!?!?!?!”

It was a funny, harmless lie — and one I’d totally believed when she’d first told me. But, more significantly, Malaka’s lie was representative of the answers that would come over the next week.

Here’s what my weeklong experiment revealed about why people fib.

They don’t want to disappoint you

Another college friend—just about the most earnest and well-intentioned guy I’ve ever met—responded to my Facebook call. He and I did some political work together in college. While I was mostly interested in provoking the fundamentalist Republicans during the late George W. Bush years, this guy wanted to bring people together. That’s still his fundamental purpose in life, and he spends much of his time working for nonprofits and volunteering.

His response? “The only lie I frequently tell is: ‘I’ll get that to you at such-and-such a time.’ I freely admit: There are many things I don’t get around to at all because I suck as a person.” (Author’s note: This is a lie. He is awesome.)

My friend sets the bar high for himself, and underneath the self-criticism is the desire not to fail or disappoint others.

It’s convenient

Many of those I surveyed admitted to lying about exaggerating their expected arrival time at a destination. My friend Emily admitted that when she says she’s a block away, “It’s at least three blocks and two avenues.”

My girlfriend admitted something similar — when she’s running late in the morning, she texts her boss that the subways are all screwed up. It’s an unimpeachable lie because it’s so often true.

And no one will ever argue with this lie, which a friend of my girlfriend’s best friend (I cast a wide net) copped to: “Every once in a while I’ll let my manager know that I have to work from home because my daughter is sick…but she isn’t,” the friend wrote over email. “I’ll send her to school, then spend the day to myself, checking emails every once in awhile.”

One guy told me he usually tells volunteers on the street that he’s already signed whatever petition or charity they’re pushing at him, just so they’ll leave him alone.

They want to make themselves or others feel good

One guy admitted to only pretending to be creative, because it seems like everyone in New York writes poetry, and he feels weird for not being artsy.

My friend Emily said she sometimes tells people that a dress she bought at, say, Urban Outfitters was actually her mom’s in the 1960s. Another person wrote that she often downplays how much money she spends on a handbag because she doesn’t want to be judged. She doesn’t want to feel ashamed of herself, or be hassled for doing something that makes her feel good; Emily just wants to feel a little more interesting.

But our falsehoods aren’t always self-interested. I heard from tons of people who regularly tell friends and coworkers that they like their outfits, even if the clothes in question actually offend their own fashion sense.

They don’t want to rock the boat

When I expanded my search to Reddit, I found an even broader range of rationales for dishonesty.

“I tell people I’m OK, and it’s usually because I don’t want to explain what’s upsetting me,” one Reddit user wrote.

Another elaborated further on the same theme: “I say ‘I’m just tired,’ which [means] I’m either upset or annoyed, usually at that person, or at something in the surrounding area that I can’t talk about without offending them or offending someone in the general area.”

Forever fibbing

From what I can tell, it seems that people mostly lie in order to avoid awkward confrontation, make others feel better or simply so that they will be left alone.

For most people, lying is just a way to get through the day without being bothered or bothering someone else. Then again, there are people like this Redditor, for whom lying can be a form of play:

“I tell everyone I have a bunch of kids…I just do it to see their reaction when they come to my house and find no family pictures [or] even enough bedrooms to house that many kids. The look on their face is priceless.”

I Asked People: What Lie Do You Tell Most Often? was originally published in Dose on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In early May, the Mets suspended one of their pitchers for an undisclosed violation of team rules. A few days later, it was reported that he had called in sick for a game he wasn’t pitching after spending a night out at 1OAK, the default nightclub for New York celebrities and rich people. Harvey has a bit of a history of being a bad boy, and since he hasn’t pitched well the last few seasons, Mets fans were livid at his behavior. In pro sports, there’s nothing worse than not being a team player; as all fans know and expect, players have to sacrifice — physically, emotionally, financially — for the good of the team.

As a jaded Mets fan (it’s hard to handle this team any other way) I rolled my eyes at the transgression and thought they might be best off trading Harvey in the off-season. Now that he’s no longer pitching like an All Star, his persona of hard-partying ultra-bro — the kind of dude who dresses like every day is a GQ photo shoot — is just obnoxious, a distraction from the goals of the organization. Then I realized that I was reading the latest New York Daily News story about the Harvey saga, tsk-tsking the fact that he wasn’t a model employee, while I myself was commuting to work about four hours later than I probably should have been.

Was I really in a position to judge Harvey for not showing up to the ballpark on a day he wasn’t scheduled to pitch? To be clear, I was working from home that morning, but I made that decision unilaterally; I’m lucky to have some flexibility in my job, but I definitely stretch it every now and then. And yeah, I’ve played hooky at jobs before. Plus, I always go to bat for people at work when they’re late, distracted or slacking off (for some good reason), or just generally having a bad day. What was it about Harvey that made it so different, that enabled me to get self-righteously upset about his sick day?

It’s impossible to talk about how Americans perceive and treat pro athletes without noting that race plays a major factor. It’s no coincidence that fans feel ownership over players, and African Americans primarily fill both NBA and NFL rosters — and do you think Tiger Woods would be suffering the same sort of humiliation after his impaired driving arrest if he wasn’t a minority — especially one that cheated on a blonde white woman? But Harvey is white, so we can put that mostly aside in this specific instance. There were other factors that led to headlines like “Matt Harvey needs to grow up, step up and apologize to the Mets,” as MLB reporter Ken Rosenthal wrote on Fox Sports after the suspension. The vitriol fired at Harvey would have sunk a warship, revealing a stunning lack of empathy and solidarity for the 28-year-old pitcher and — this is the important point — employee.

Though the peaceful accord between labor unions and corporations in the decades after World War II is more nostalgic myth than actual history, the irrefutable fact is that unionism, and with it a sense of worker solidarity, has fallen dramatically over the last 40 years. In 1980, 23 percent of American workers belonged to unions, while just 11 percent have representation in the workplace today. At the same time, organized athletes have enjoyed unprecedented victories, legally and then financially.

“The summer of 1981 was emblematic of this,” Daniel Gilbert, a labor historian at the University of Illinois who focuses on baseball, tells dose. “The MLBPA [the union for MLB players] successfully defended free agency by going on strike and roundly defeating team owners. That was within weeks of Reagan firing the air traffic controllers (the striking members of PATCO), in one of the key symbolic moments in the decline of the American labor movement.”

Reagan brought with him a conservative ethos of freedom and “personal responsibility” and kicked off the me-first 80s. Though his policies generally led to dead ends for workers, the Gipper’s sunny disposition and delusional notions of the rugged American individualist made his far-right ideology go mainstream. Union leaders have been vilified — polling has shown voters in the 80s and 90s believed they were linked to organized crime — and laws have weakened them further. Over half of the states now have so-called Right to Work laws, which make it possible for workers to opt out of union dues at organized workplaces.

The Republican Party has mounted a sustained attack on the social safety net, pushing the idea that people shouldn’t be obligated to support one another. The blossoming of the freelance economy has fractured the workplace even further, and so not only has it become harder to earn a living, but it’s also reinforced the sense that one must go it alone and compete against fellow workers instead of fighting on their behalf — many people no longer even have real coworkers. And companies like Uber are backed by Democratic operatives, as well, so it’s a bipartisan problem.

A story in the Harvard Business Review last year put some numbers on the workplace empathy problem. It cited a recent study of people in various service professions that suggested our current labor arrangement is exhausting our humanity. “People who reported workplace behaviors such as ‘taking time to listen to coworkers’ problems and worries’ and helping others who have heavy workloads’ felt less capable of connecting with their families. They felt emotionally drained and burdened by work-related demands.”

Sure, Harvey is making over $5 million to play baseball, not driving an Uber or doing odd jobs as a Taskrabbit. So he’s not exactly living paycheck to paycheck, and doesn’t really need our sympathy. Still, as it turns out, he’s spending the night at the club drinking away heartbreak until late in the night, which is something we can all relate to. But more importantly, Harvey is still an employee, and while a well-compensated one, he’s at the mercy of billionaire ball club owners.

Somehow we’ve become more likely to side with billionaires than athletes: when Quicken Loans billionaire Dan Gilbert wrote his famous Comic Sans letter ripping LeBron James for leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers for Miami, millions cheered. Kevin Durant was similarly scathed last summer for jumping from Oklahoma City to Oakland, and he wasn’t a hometown hero. Durant was simply exercising a choice to play for a team that gave him a better chance to win.

Who can blame him? Fans — that’s who. There are 20 billionaire owners in the NBA alone, yet Durant — a single player looking out for himself in accordance with the rules of a signed collective-bargaining agreement — got the heat.

“I think an even deeper transformation [than the decline in unions] has been a shift in how fans are invited to understand and engage with baseball and other sports,” Professor Gilbert says. “More and more, we follow the business of sports as itself a critical part of the action. Spectacles like the NFL draft and, to a lesser degree, the baseball winter meetings, are front page news in the sports world. More and more, fans are put in the position of viewing sports from the perspective of management.”

That makes us ruthless, always hoping that players make less than owners are willing to pay, even though owners, again, are mostly billionaires. That’s especially true in baseball, which has no hard salary cap. This attitude is reflective of the way we view one another, in our day-to-day lives, whether we’re on hourly wages, fixed income or in the middle class.

The double standard does work both ways, to some degree. Athletes who have trouble with the law are often given second chances that normal people with criminal records or a history of legal trouble are rarely afforded; Michael Vick came back to the NFL after serving time for running a dogfighting ring, and plenty of pros are accused of domestic violence, serve a suspension and are then welcomed back to their teams.

In fact, the Mets have two players who have been accused of hitting their wives in the last two off-seasons. I was very uncomfortable with the team signing Jose Reyes last year after his suspension, but fans welcomed the old great back to the team to fill what the author Stanley Teitelbaum calls “hero hunger.”

Then again — as painful as it can be to acknowledge it in those circumstances — society is supposed to allow people back in after committing crimes (or being accused of crimes). Even the idea that someone should be banned from working after paying the price for their off-the-field actions smacks of the inherently conservative law-and-order worldview that gave rise to private prisons and purging freed felons from the voter rolls.

It’s a lot to extrapolate from a short suspension of a baseball player. But seeing Harvey publicly shamed during a press conference a few days later made me think of just how powerless we all are against the will and wrath of employers, and choosing to participate in the Coliseum-like backlash only makes us all even more fractured and weak.

We Hate Pro Athletes, But We Need To Be On The Same Team was originally published in Dose on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Japan is known for its expensive real estate and tiny apartments — and they’re only getting smaller. They may be architectural wonders, but imagine spending years at a time holed up in a tiny unit, avoiding the outside world. That’s the reality faced by over 500,000 young Japanese people, known as hikikomori.

The Japanese government defines a hikikomori as someone who has withdrawn from society for six months or more. Hikikomori make up 1.6% of the country’s citizens between the ages of 15–39. The phenomenon is the result of a confluence of sociological factors. Some researchers suggest that at least a little bit of this phenomenon can be attributed to otaku culture—people obsessed with manga, anime, video games and other imagined worlds. But usually it goes deeper than that: a 2014 survey indicated that only 7.5% of Japanese youth feel satisfied with themselves.

Another study asserted that tight-knit Japanese families can create both overdependent children who have trouble functioning on their own as adults, and “counter-dependent” kids, who rebel against the huge expectations put on them by their parents. When the pressure becomes too much, they withdraw from the world. Some drop out of school, and few of them work.

There’s also still a stigma surrounding mental health issues in Japan, which makes it more difficult for many to re-enter society. Some hikikomori suffer from other issues, such as clinical depression, and they stay indoors instead of seek out help.

That so many young people have isolated themselves presents a huge challenge to the country. With 127 million people, Japan is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and the Tokyo metropolitan area is the largest of its kind. But Japan’s birthrate has been so low for so long that the population is now actually declining, causing alarm for the world’s third biggest economy. The country’s leader, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has made it his goal to keep the number from slipping below 100 million, and drawing the hikikomori back into society is a big part of that mission.

Half A Million Japanese People Never Leave Home, But Why? was originally published in OMGFacts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here’s another thing your parents and teachers misled you about: tying your shoes.

It’s known by many names — bunny ears; loop, swoop, and pull; and “the Granny knot” — but the truth is that the way most people learned to tie their shoes is inefficient and scientifically inferior. Yes, scientists are studying this stuff, and what they’ve found is that the traditional method for tying shoes comes undone due to friction and movement. It can happen suddenly — even if your laces have been secure for hours.

In other words, the moment you start running, the clock is ticking on your safety.

This phenomenon was put to the test in a study at the University of California at Berkeley. Oliver O’Reilly, a professor of mechanical engineering, wanted to take a closer look at the actions we take when we run, so he put two assistants on treadmills and also employed a mechanical leg that would stomp on the ground, according to The Guardian.

O’Reilly and his team found that a runner’s foot strikes the ground at seven times the force of gravity, and each time the shoe hits the ground, the more the bows of your laces get jostled loose. In between, each time the leg swings forward, the extra lace gets pulled back and forth, loosening the knot even more. With just a few strides and stomps, the lace comes undone.

“It’s unpredictable but when it happens, it’s in two or three strides,” O’Reilly says.

If physics is not your bag, here’s a video that will help you visualize the phenomenon:

Here’s the good news: There’s a solution, and no, it’s not reverting to Velcro. (Though there’s no shame in that!) If you want to keep wearing your favorite running shoes or Air Jordans, you’ll be well served by learning to tie a square-knot bow.

Here’s how to do it: Pull the right lace over left lace, then pull it under and through. Then pull the left lace over the right lace, then under and through. For the bow, make some loops and pull the one in your right hand behind the one in your left hand.

It’s just a small tweak from the standard Granny bow, but it takes a little bit of practice to get right, since you’re unlearning what has basically become instinct at this point. Here’s a video that’ll help you better picture how to do it:

Good luck with the unlearning process!

Science Says You’ve Been Tying Your Shoelaces Wrong Your Whole Life was originally published in OMGFacts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The messages started trickling in, one slur and Holocaust allusion after the other, from white guys (always white guys ) with usernames like Deplorable Hank and Shotgun Willie. They called me things like Juden and Shlomo. They told me to go back to Israel (I’ve never been) or else I’d face relocation somewhere else: a gas chamber.

The messages, though unexpected, weren’t out of the blue: Shortly after the election, I tweeted this:

Jordan Zakarin on Twitter

As a New Yorker, this is the first time I've really felt afraid for being a Jew. Trump's empowerment of anti-semitism has me terrified.

A few days later, the Nazi-wannabes started coming out of the woodwork.

The nasty messages I got were equal parts depressing and exhilarating. I grew up in a New Jersey commuter town outside New York City, went to Syracuse University and then moved to the city after graduating. Needless to say there was no shortage of Jews in my life. The stories I heard growing up about anti-Semitism felt like ancient history. I knew it existed, but it never really affected me.

That made it easier for me to be, well, kind of a shitty Jew. I didn’t fast on holidays or go to synagogue. I went to Hebrew school two hours a week (and spent those getting into trouble). These days, I couldn’t read Hebrew if my poor grandma’s life depended on it.

But when I started getting those tweets, and seeing the spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes around the country, I felt a fear of being Jewish for the first time. I was suddenly on guard. At the same time I was perversely excited that I was finally seeing the boogeyman I’d been warned against my whole life.

I was also pissed off at other Jews all of a sudden — especially the religious ones. That’s one of the many strange twists of this saga: Some Jews make it really hard for me to feel empathetic to my own community.

About 70% of American Jews voted for Hillary. That’s a healthy margin, but also cause for alarm. Many Jews in the US — about 30%, it seems — have become single issue voters, demanding blind support for the Israeli government no matter how brutal its policies. These Jews are no better than Evangelicals who vote for the most viciously anti-gay and anti-abortion politicians, regardless of how those politicians’ other policies might destroy the economy, health care or the climate.

Even fewer Jews (69% of US Jews) voted for Obama in 2012 than voted for Hillary in November. That’s because Obama was more reluctant than Bush was about aligning with Israel’s government on every single issue.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has aggressively built new settlements in the West Bank, and Republicans have played American Jews for suckers by turning a blind eye to it. Trump declared himself a militant supporter of Israel and its right to build in disputed territory. For this vocal encouragement — along with the fact that Ivanka converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner — many American Jews supported the now-president.

The irony is that Trump’s top adviser is an unrepentant conspiracy theorist who has spent years sowing the seeds of anti-semitism, which as a result found its way into Trump’s campaign material. Trump also hired Sebastian Gorka, a known neo-Nazi, and otherwise cultivated a so-called “alt-right” movement that turned a stupid ugly internet frog into a new swastika.

How could we be this stupid? We were hoodwinked by a blustering populist, bots and Russia. It makes me mad and ashamed to have these Jews suggesting that they speak for me or are trying to protect me. Even if we did agree on Israel — which we don’t — it takes a special ignorance for someone obsessed with past persecution to vote for a man so openly bent on persecuting others.

This sounds harsh, I know. And I’ve wondered whether my lifelong aversion to religion has left me biased against religious Jews. So I asked a Jewish friend of mine, who is more religious than I am — and also politically outspoken — what she thought about the schism in the American Jewish community.

“It is deeply upsetting to see members of my own family have voted for Trump, to see that they don’t recognize bigotry and hatred and just refuse to become accomplices to it,” she told me in an email. “Even though he started with Mexicans and Muslims, Jews should feel a moral obligation to stand up to it. Come on, we are always on the list! If nothing else, our drive for self preservation should have kicked in immediately upon the announcement of his candidacy. But, as it turns out, some of my family members are simply racist and those racist messages appealed to them.”

She nails a hard truth in that last sentence; sure, Jews share a common history and gather together every year to commemorate the Holocaust, but like any other group, our values became warped and splintered as we assimilated into American culture.

My dilemma runs deeper. I’m pretty left-wing — I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary, and wouldn’t mind seeing America adopt some kind of democratic socialism that rewarded and empowered the working class, or at least created a fair playing field. But the left hasn’t been particularly welcoming to Jews, either. While I don’t support the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians in most cases, I understand that some of the left wing in America is informed by anti-Semitism as well.

Look at Rasmea Odeh, who helped organize the Day Without Women protest earlier this month. It was a brilliant event, sure, but it turns out that she’s a convicted Palestinian terrorist, having been convicted of a 1969 bombing in an Israeli supermarket that killed two Hebrew University students. Odeh, who is 70 years old now, says she was forced to confess under duress. Maybe that’s true. But either way, she represents a version of the left-wing that is none too friendly to Jews (who are one of its core constituencies).

My Jewish friend agrees. “At the Washington Square rally, there was A LOT of ‘Zionism is evil’ types of stuff coming from the speakers,” she told me. “I deeply oppose the occupation, but when Israel is called out singularly like that, and when there’s a woman with actual Jewish blood on her hands leading the international strike, it reeks of anti-Semitism. To be honest, I have been deflated ever since. I just don’t think anyone *actually* cares about Jews. We are being used as props.”

That’s been the biggest lesson for me. Being Jewish means being both ignored and placed in the center of a sick political battle between people who have no regard for you. I feel more protective of my family now than I did six months ago, seeing what kind of hatred is out there, but ashamed of many people that are ostensibly part of my community. Being Jewish, for me, is more or less a microcosm of living in Trump’s America: Proud of many people in my community, but increasingly angry at and embarrassed of the actions of those driven by hatred and fear.

Trump Has Made Me Prouder & More Afraid Of Being Jewish was originally published in Dose on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Shortly after they were sworn into office last month, the new Republican governors of Missouri and Kentucky each signed a law with a deceptive name and devastating impact. In becoming the 27th and 28th states to enact “Right To Work” laws, they let loose a regulation killer that eviscerates labor unions by allowing employees to opt out of paying small dues to the organizations that negotiate their contracts and protect their rights in the workplace.

Borne out of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, Right To Work was codified in its first few decades largely across the low-wage and anti-union south. The laws didn’t take hold in a big way over the next 40 years, but over the last half decade they’ve become fashionable again, their passage in eight more states coinciding with Republican takeovers of two-thirds of state governments. That’s no coincidence, as the law functions to depress wages and worker autonomy, while increasing economic stratification — all outcomes preferred by the corporate donors that finance the Republican Party.

Also not a coincidence: The resurgence of the law began after the Supreme Court’s controversial Citizens United decision, giving corporations unlimited political spending power. That only helped fuel the push already underway: Southern businessmen founded The National Right To Work Committee in the 70s, while business-backed Chamber of Commerce groups have long pressed for the legislation to be enacted in different states.

Right To Work doesn’t destroy unions outright, at least not right away. Instead, it entitles all workers to contract benefits and workplace protections afforded to members, without requiring them to pay dues. That serves to slowly bankrupt unions, impairing their ability to negotiate with employers for workers in the future and depleting the resources required to unionize workers elsewhere. That dooms future contract negotiations at unionized companies, while denying workers elsewhere the means to fight for better jobs and wages. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Well, if you don’t buy the cow, someone’s gonna starve it to death.

The non-alternative facts

The non-partisan math — the non-alternative facts — have long made clear that these laws are detrimental to workers. A study published in 2001 found that “the mean effect of working in a Right To Work state results in a 6% to 8% reduction in wages for workers in these states.” When controlled for regional differences, the average wage penalty was 4% per worker.

In 2007, Hofstra professor Lonnie K. Stevans published a study that also controlled for economic conditions and other laws enacted in various states. His deep mathematical analysis found that “wages and personal income are both lower in Right To Work states, yet proprietors’ income is higher.”

Half a decade later, as the country clawed itself out of a recession and the economy was being remade by the internet, the one constant was that Right To Work states offered worse economic conditions for workers. In 2015, researchers for the Economic Policy Institute found incomes for workers in Right To Work states were on average 3.1% lower than the salaries of their counterparts in more union-friendly states.

That amounted to $1558 less a year in take-home pay — and that’s when you adjust for lots of economic factors. Without those controls, it’s even uglier. In 2014, a more simple look at income, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that workers in Right To Work economies made $6,109 (or 12.1%) less on average.

A 2011 EPI study was down-the-line terrible for those trying to argue that Right To Work does anything other than hurt workers. Employers unencumbered by empowered organized labor offered healthcare at a 2.6% lower rate and pensions at a 4.8% lower rate. So not only are workers paid less, they’re given less help with staying healthy, and less hope of retiring at an appropriate time.

It’s only been a few years since the new batch of states began passing Right To Work laws, so any economic data analyzing the impact comes with the large caveat of being culled from a small sample size. And yet, the early returns don’t look great.

When Wisconsin was debating enacting the law in 2015, the policy site UrbanMilwaukee.com looked at the job growth in comparable states, Indiana and Michigan, since they passed Right To Work in 2012. Spoiler alert: Job growth in both those states lagged behind the rest of the country, after having kept pace in the years prior.

And yet Wisconsin — led by Governor Scott Walker and a legislature dominated by Republicans — passed the law later that year.

The only other economic argument — that these laws help attract big business — also falls flat when we look at the data. As Newsweek pointed out last year, the State New Economy Index in 2014 showed that Right To Work is a non-factor to the high-tech, high-wage manufacturers that the law is allegedly designed to attract.

The impact for unions… and Democrats

So why do politicians vote for Right To Work laws if they hurt the average citizen?

First there are ideological reasons. If you’re being generous, you might say that conservatives still believe in trickle-down economics, which calls for less regulation of businesses so that they can grow and pay workers better. If you’re being realistic, you’d say that conservatism has proven over the last 70 years to be more comfortable with economic inequality in the name of “freedom,” and that faux-libertarian spirit is at the heart of Right To Work laws.

But modern economic conservative movements aren’t fueled simply by ideology. Instead, the Republican Party benefits from the vast majority of political donations from businesses — a cash flow that has turned into a flood since the Citizens United decision. The biggest corporate PACs now send most of their political money to the GOP, even in Silicon Valley, where some of the individual CEOs tend to favor Democrats.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has pushed — and sometimes even written, word for word — the recent spate of Right To Work laws. ALEC is a massive organization that is financed almost entirely by major corporate PACs and billionaires, including Charles Koch, the single biggest financier of the Republican Party.

ALEC devotes much of its time to writing sample legislation favorable to its financiers and then pushing it on its member politicians. Think of an ALEC conference as a country club where big corporate donors hang out with politicians whose campaigns they just happen to finance.

And in the case of Right To Work, conservative politicians stand to gain in several ways. By passing Right To Work, not only do politicians please their donors, they also get to fuel the destruction of their political opponents.

Hard numbers vary, but studies have found that union members are anywhere from 2.5% to 10% more likely to vote than non-members. And those votes more often than not go to Democrats, as unions overwhelmingly back the Democratic Party, both with campaign services — donations, ground game, TV ads — and at the ballot box.

Union members are more progressive, regardless of their income. Workplace democracy empowers low-wage workers to fight harder for collective victories, and union membership keeps higher income members more connected to community.

Richard Freeman of the National Bureau of Economic Research has concluded that unionism “moves members to the left of where they would be given their socioeconomic status,” and that members “have attitudes and voting inclinations favorable to the Democrats and to liberalism prior to a given campaign.”

In the 2008 presidential election, union members broke for Barack Obama by 20%. Four years later, he won that demographic by 18%. While Hillary Clinton won union members by only 8% last year — thanks to Trump’s impossible promise to bring back millions of lost manufacturing jobs — nearly every major union group, including the umbrella organization the AFL-CIO, worked hard for her campaign. This cycle, unions spent $167 million on elections. Nearly all of that was in service of Clinton and Democrats.

Sure, billionaires can now pour unlimited funds into politics — and those like the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson do — but the union combination of cash, foot soldiers and progressive voters is a potent mix. The easiest way to counteract it? Slowly draining unions of their members.

That has happened naturally, to some degree, thanks to the automation and offshoring of manufacturing jobs. But the Reagan era kicked off a concentrated political assault on unions as well; since 1983, public union membership has fallen from over 20% of workers nationwide to just over 10% last year. There are now only 14.6 million union members, and Right To Work has proven to be a contributing factor.

Michigan provides the perfect example. Though the auto industry was rescued in 2010 and has rebounded since, the state’s union membership has plummeted over the last half-decade. In 2013, 16.3% of workers in Michigan were union members; last year, it fell to 14.4%.

Indiana is the one exception to the rule, having seen a small rise in membership since its 2012 passage, but you can chalk up much of that to the economic recovery, as well as to the fact that the state was at its lowest union member density in 25 years when the law was passed. Oklahoma’s union population has dropped from 8.6% in 2001 to under 6% more recently.

The stakes could not be higher

While blue states represent more union-friendly territory, and even some states with Republican legislatures have declined to make the full leap — New Hampshire’s voted down Right To Work earlier this month — there’s still a real danger that this could become national policy.

Right now, there are several lawsuits working their way through the courts, all sponsored by Right To Work interest groups. Challenges to “free ride” fees — the small dues employees pay to unions that negotiate with employers on their behalf — are underway in Illinois and California and other blue states. And even if they don’t win with Circuit Courts — and many plaintiffs don’t expect to be victorious there — the goal is to get the case to the Supreme Court.

Had former President Obama been able to get a hearing for Merrick Garland, his Supreme Court nominee, this would be a less daunting prospect for unions. But should President Trump’s nominee, Neil Gorsuch, make it to the bench, any case for unions becomes more dicey. And if the Supreme Court sides with plaintiffs against any mandatory fees, it will have the effect of eviscerating unions, making Right To Work more or less the law of the land.

The stakes could not be higher, for both unions and Democrats.

This Law Could Destroy Workers’ Rights Forever was originally published in Dose on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.