Many of today’s “red” states have historically had strong trade union
movements – think of Michigan, Missouri and Wisconsin – but after
Citizens United opened the floodgates to dark money from the super-rich
in state politics, the states saw their legislatures fill up with
ideologue Republicans who passed anti-union laws designed to weaken
labor and allow employers to pay their workers less, cut their benefits,
fire them more easily, and subject them to less safe, less dignified
working conditions.
Missouri’s anti-union “right to work” law was signed into law last year by the state’s disgraced, loathsome (now ex-)governor,
Eric Greitens. At the time, it seemed the fix was in: between voter
suppression campaigns and gerrymandering, the Missouri legislature was
effectively insulated from the will of the people it governed, able to
secure re-election by doing the dirty work of the state’s wealthy elite
to the detriment of the state’s majority of (disenfranchised) working
people.
But Missourians fought back. The state’s trade unions canvassed for
signatures to put the right to work law on the ballot during the August
special election. The law was so unpopular that the AFL-CIO was able to
get more than 300,000 signatures on direct ballot petition (they only
needed 100,000), and when Missourians went to the polls this week, they
easily carried the day – and the law is dead, with 65% of Missourians
voting to kill it.
Missouri organizers say that the 1% have awakened a “sleeping giant”:
that working people have woken up to the risk posed by the concentration
of money into fewer and fewer hands, the hoarding of America’s
prosperity, the distorting of its policies, and they are not going to
take it anymore.
The special election was also a litmus test for Missouri politicians:
many of the politicians who campaigned to keep unions down during this
race are up for re-election in November, and the triumphant labor
activists who scored this victory will make sure voters are reminded of
their representatives’ positions when those campaigns kick off.
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