Missouri voters override prospective anti-union law

After a succession of political setbacks in onetime strongholds and a landmark defeat in the Supreme Court, organized labor has notched a hard-won victory as Missouri voters overrode a legislative move to curb union power.

A measure on the ballot Tuesday asked voters to pass judgment on a prospective law barring private-sector unions from collecting mandatory fees from workers who choose not to become members. The law was rejected by a 2-1 ratio.

The Supreme Court in June struck down such fees for public-sector employees, achieving a long-standing goal of conservative groups and overruling a four-decade precedent.

Labor leaders argued that the rare opportunity for voters to weigh in directly on a so-called right-to-work measure — which several states have passed in recent years — revealed how little public support the policy has, at least once voters get beyond the anodyne branding.

“It shows how out of touch those institutions are,” said Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. “How out of touch the Republican legislature in Missouri is, how out of touch the Supreme Court is.”

But Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist who studies unions at Washington University in St. Louis, cautioned against overstating the victory. A mere 8.7 percent of workers in Missouri were union members last year, below the national average and down from more than 13 percent a decade and a half ago.

“A ‘win’ just returns the situation to the status quo,” Rosenfeld said by email, although he acknowledged that it was “a huge morale boost to a beleaguered movement.”

The examples of Michigan and Indiana, where right-towork laws took effect earlier this decade, suggest that the legislation could have cost unions thousands of members and millions in revenue.

One question is the extent to which the victory could reverberate beyond Missouri.

“I think this will build momentum and send a message to all legislators,” Trumka said, “that if you vote against the people, go against the will of the vast majority of working Americans, it’s going to cost you.”

But it was not immediately clear that the forces driving the impressive showing for labor in Missouri could be reproduced elsewhere.

One reason is that Republican voters who buck their party on a ballot measure, as many appeared to do in Missouri, may be unwilling to vote against Republican candidates in a general election, even when those candidates are hostile to labor.

“There’s a big difference between overturning the law itself and defeating legislators who supported it,” said Jonathon Prouty, a Missouri political consultant and former executive director of the state’s Republican Party. “It’s a lot easier for unions to energize their base around the issue, which is right-to-work, rather than against candidates.”

T.J. Berry, a Republican state representative whose district includes some outer suburbs of Kansas City, said that many of his constituents were proud union members who opposed right-to-work but nonetheless voted Republican because they were conservative on issues like abortion and guns.

“I have four guys who are Ford workers in my Sunday School class,” Berry said. “And they fit exactly what I’ve told you: pro- life, pro- gun and pro-worker. All of them voted for Trump.”

Labor also appeared to enjoy a significant financial advantage in Missouri that is unlikely to occur in other states where Republicans have the wherewithal to pass right-to-work bills. According to state financial filings, the union-funded We Are Missouri coalition had spent just over $15 million on its ballot campaign as of late July, about three times what the four leading groups supporting the right-to-work legislation spent over the same period.

A key factor behind this disparity was the leadership vacuum that the former Republican governor, Eric Greitens, left when he resigned amid scandal in May.

“He was going to be the champion, then he was embroiled in controversy the whole year,” Berry said. “If you don’t have a leader, it’s pretty hard to rally the troops.”