Could someone explain to me right to work?

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Originally, I was under the impression that in non-right to work states, you could be forced into a union out of the blue, just because a union operated in a particular place. Now I am hearing that it is based upon whether the union and employer agreed to it. Could someone please elaborate?

The Taft-Hartley Act outlawed the closed shop in the United States in 1947, but permits the union shop, except in those states that have passed right-to-work laws, in which case even the union shop is illegal. An employer may not lawfully agree with a union to hire only union members; it may, on the other hand, agree to require employees to join the union or pay the equivalent of union dues to it after a set period of time. Similarly, while a union could require an employer that had agreed to a closed shop contract prior to 1947 to fire an employee who had been expelled from the union for any reason, it cannot demand that an employer fire an employee under a union shop contract for any reason other than failure to pay those dues that are uniformly required of all employees.

Construction unions and unions in other industries with similar employment patterns have coped with that prohibition by using exclusive hiring halls as a means of controlling the supply of labor. While such exclusive hiring halls do not, in a strictly formal sense, require union membership as a condition of employment, they do so in practical terms, in that an employee seeking to be dispatched to work through the union's hiring hall must either pay union dues or pay a roughly equivalent hiring hall fee. So long as the hiring hall is run on a non-discriminatory basis and adheres to clearly stated eligibility and dispatch standards it is lawful. The Taft-Hartley Act also bars unions from requiring unreasonably high initiation fees as a condition of membership in order to prevent unions from using initiation fees as a device to keep non-union employees out of a particular industry.

For the entertainment industry, unions representing performers have as their first rule one banning any represented performer from working on any non-union production. Penalties are imposed on the union member, not on the employer, and can lead to loss of union membership. Most major productions are union productions, and non-members join the Screen Actors Guild through performing as extras and earning three union vouchers, or by being given a speaking line and entering that way. The other performance unions do not have minimum membership standards, but joining the union bars one from working on non-union productions.

Also, the National Labor Relations Act permits construction employers to enter into pre-hire agreements, in which they agree to draw their workforces from a pool of employees dispatched by the union. The NLRA prohibits pre-hire agreements outside the construction industry.[3]

From the wikipedia page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop