The Missouri Initiative: Taking back worker power one ballot at a time

by Douglas Williams

The eyes of the labor movement were on Missouri on August 7, 2018.

The previous year, the Republican-dominated Missouri General Assembly passed Senate Bill 19. The bill would have made Missouri the 28th right-to-work state. With the signature of Gov. Eric Greitens on February 6, 2017, the law was set to take effect on August 27th of that same year.

Realizing that this was the likely outcome given the Republican trifecta -- control of the governor’s mansion and both houses of the General Assembly -- labor unions and community allies such as the Missouri NAACP filed to place SB 19 on the ballot that same day. In order to make it on the ballot, signatures totaling at least five percent of the total number of voters in the last gubernatorial election had to be collected from at least six of the state’s eight congressional districts.

This amounted to a little over 100,000 signatures in all that had to be collected within 90 days of the end of the legislative session on May 30th. Opponents of the bill formed an umbrella campaign called We Are Missouri to oppose the bill and set to work collecting signatures. Though the deadline for turning in the signatures was on August 27, We Are Missouri ended up turning in the signatures -- all 310,567 of them -- nine days early.

Supporters of the right-to-work law, however, had one last card up their sleeve. Seeing that they could not stop the referendum from taking place, they sought to set the election at a time when they believed that fewer people would come out and support labor. As such, Republicans in the General Assembly passed a bill that moved the date of the vote from the general election on November 6th to the state’s primary election date on August 7th. Of the eight ballot initiatives to be decided by Missouri voters in 2018, it was only Proposition A that would be decided in August.

It did not matter.

Forty years after Missouri voters first beat back the open shop, Senate Bill 19 was repealed, with 67.5 percent of Missouri voters rejecting the right to work for less. The “no” vote carried 99 of Missouri’s 114 counties, including counties that would go on to vote heavily against U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in the November general election. Even in Cape Girardeau County -- one of the most conservative counties in the state, where the federal courthouse is named after one Rush Hudson Limbaugh, Sr. -- the two sides fought to a draw.

This history is instructive because the Show-Me State might have shown the labor movement a path forward in turning the tide against anti-worker policies at the state level.

Missouri labor’s victory on right-to-work was possible because they are among the 23 states that allow veto referendums. These ballot measures seek to take laws that have been passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor and put them up for a public vote with the express purpose of overturning them. However, the usage of this as a means of overturning anti-worker laws in many states is limited due to a statute of limitations of sorts: they can only be used to prevent legislation passed by the most recently concluded legislative session in the states. While there are recent instances where the veto referendum has been used to stop other anti-worker legislation -- Ohio’s veto of Senate Bill 5 in 2011, which would have ended collective bargaining in the public sector, is one example -- states where open shop laws have been on the books for decades will find this of little use.

But the path that Missouri has shown us can still be realized through the initiative process.

Ballot initiatives operate much like veto referendums do, in that they require a certain number of signatures from the public in order to show that there is popular demand for making a change in state laws or the state constitution. But unlike veto referendums, they do not have to be initiated within a certain period of time after the law has been passed. They can be used to create new laws and constitutional amendments

There are a total of 24 states that have a popular initiative process. Out of those, thirteen states have right-to-work laws on the books.

Popular education

How is the public usually informed about labor unions? Some unions might run ads showcasing the work that they do. Others might engage in community organizing activities to build trust and solidarity amongst the public. The Fight For 15 in North America is a great example of unions coming together to lobby for workers at the state level.

Most times, however, the labor movement is most visible at two times: strike actions and endorsements in partisan elections.

To focus on the latter instance, unions endorse candidates that they feel will be the best advocates for the working class. Because of the increasing political polarization that has occurred between the two major parties over the last couple of decades, this has resulted in labor unions increasingly advocating for Democrats in general election matchups. One only needs to take a glance at the anti-worker actions taken by Republicans at the state and federal levels to understand why that is.

But if you have done union organizing or even been a rank-and-file member of a labor union, you know that workers come in all kinds of ideological colors: Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, socialists, and libertarians all count themselves amongst our ranks. And, unfortunately, everyone does not vote on whether a candidate will defend their right to collectively bargain and grow the labor movement. Guns, abortion, and many other issues get much more attention from the media -- and, in turn, the general public -- than issues surrounding labor does.

But in an initiative campaign, all of that is stripped away. The question on the ballot becomes a simple one: do you support this specific policy or not?

This level of focus in the question being asked at the ballot box allows unions to engage in a mass campaign of popular education around one issue: the labor movement itself. We can educate people on the fact that wages are lower in open shop states. We can talk about the millionaires and billionaires who pour money into lobbying against policies that would benefit the working class. And we can educate people on what a union-free America would look like for workers on a day-to-day level, all while avoiding issues that anti-worker politicians use to divide the rank-and-file.

The effectiveness of pursuing such a strategy can be found whenever you look at a map of a recent pro-worker victory on a ballot initiative versus how that state voted in a recent partisan election.

Left, the 2010 gubernatorial race in Ohio, won by Republican John Kasich. Right, the results of Ohio State Issue 2 in 2011, overturning a ban on public-sector collective bargaining.

Left, the 2016 gubernatorial race in Missouri, won by Republican Eric Greitens. Right, the results from Missouri’s Proposition A in 2018, overturning right-to-work in the state.

But it is not just the ability to reach across ideologies that makes this plan so attractive. It is also the ability to take politicians and their wavering political will out of the equation.

A binding will of the people

So you have had an election, and labor-friendly candidates have run the table. You now have a seat in the halls of power. Hell, some of those elected might be union members themselves. Everything is smooth sailing from there, right?

Wrong.

In Nevada, Democrats just about swept the 2018 elections. They won every statewide office save for Secretary of State, and came within 6,000 votes of winning that office as well. But even more importantly for labor unions, Democrats won unified control of the Nevada Legislature, completing the first state government trifecta since 1990.

This provided the first and best opportunity at repealing an already-enacted right-to-work law in the United States in nearly 60 years. And with the state being home to powerful unions in the hotel, casino, and construction industries, Democrats would face a big push to fulfill the promise of their newfound political power and deliver for the working class in a big way.

But would Democrats seize the opportunity to make history? The initial reading does not look promising:

“Right to work should really be called right to work for less,” state Sen. Yvanna Cancela said via email. “It’s a destructive policy that has been used across the country to weaken unions.”

But don’t look for a repeal effort any time soon.

“I’m interested in a long term strategy to repeal Nevada’s right-to-work statutes,” Cancela said. “This session though, the immediate focus is on repealing policies passed in 2015 that diminished prevailing wage and worker protections.”

With any kind of exercise where you elect people to do things on your behalf, you are dependent on their political will to make things happen. In addition to that, you are also competing against many other groups who want to see changes made on the issues that they care about as well. And due to the wide divergence in the length of a legislature, as well as the amount of time they spend in session -- some state legislatures are full-time, most others are not -- you also have to compete against the clock.

Ballot initiatives get around this policy problem in two ways.

The first one is that the initiative process takes place in a separate political space from representative politics. The work of collecting signatures acts as a measure of support for the initiative in question, and American politics is full of issues that enjoy higher popular support from the public than from the politicians the public puts in office. Whereas corporate lobbyists can apply pressure directly on politicians by cutting off donations or promising to back a challenger at the next election, the general public can be much less susceptible to such tactics. And in the case that a community’s economic lifeblood is threatened by a large corporation’s bullying tactics on an issue, it could even backfire against them.

The second thing is that the results of an initiative are binding. That is not foolproof per se, as we have seen in Florida with the successful referendum to restore voting rights to felons being watered down by the state’s Republican majority. But there are often hard political costs for those who are seen as having attempted to overturn the will of the people expressed in a democratic vote. And with a group like a labor union, with its diverse ideological expression amongst the rank-and-file, efforts to overturn a repeal of right-to-work might not prove fatal for a legislator’s political future.

There are many benefits to the labor movement engaging with a strategy that puts union members and their communities at the forefront of political struggle like this. But I would be remiss if I did not mention that there are drawbacks as well. One need not look any further than Michigan’s Proposal 2 in 2012 for an example of how this can go wrong.

Led by the state’s largest union -- the United Auto Workers (UAW) -- Michigan’s labor movement put the Protect Our Jobs Amendment on the ballot for November 6, 2012. The amendment would have placed the right to collective bargaining for all workers in the Michigan Constitution. In the state that birthed modern-day private-sector unionism, such a referendum would have seemed to be a slam dunk.

But Michigan was not the same place that it was during the days of the great workers’ struggles against Ford and General Motors. The state’s unemployment rate was at 8.9 percent, which was above the national average. Detroit was but a few months away from declaring bankruptcy and being placed under emergency management, the declaration of such results in a special administrator being appointed by the state and seizing control of the city’s finances. With the state still having not yet recovered from the fallout of the Great Recession, anti-worker politicians and corporations painted the initiative as a union power grab that would limit Michigan’s economic recovery.

The gambit worked to devastating effect. Proposal 2 was defeated, with 57 percent of Michiganders voting against the referendum. Gov. Rick Snyder and his fellow Republicans who controlled the Legislature essentially used the referendum as a head count of support for anti-labor policy. In the lame-duck session of the Legislature that year, Michigan would become the 24th state to go right-to-work.

There are many lessons to be learned from the Michigan experience, but the biggest one is that these plans cannot ignore the external environment in which these battles take place. Politics is all about timing and opportunity, and the metrics on both could not have been worse for Michigan’s labor movement.

Today, however, the timing is just about right for these initiatives to kick off. The economy is in a superficial recovery, with a low unemployment rate and the stock market seemingly touching historic highs. But while billionaires like Jeff Bezos seem to be piling on billion after billion in their bank account, the working class is not seeing the same kind of windfall in their weekly paycheck. Workers are waking up to this, and they are beginning to demand ever more radical solutions to this yawning inequality. Who could have ever imagined that a self-described socialist would be a serious contender not only for the Democratic nomination, but for the presidency itself, a decade ago? Who could have imagined that demands such as single-payer health care or a jubilee for student loan debt would become actionable political demands in the United States?

But that is where we are right now, and the movement needs to capitalize on this opportunity while it can.

Now is the time to make the bosses defend their anti-worker policies at the ballot box. The labor movement faces an existential threat from Washington, D.C. and the statehouses where anti-worker politics thrive. There is no bigger virus in the capitalist laboratory than a policy that breaks working-class solidarity, pits worker against worker, and eliminates the tools needed for workers to fight back. That virus is right-to-work, and its cure is popular democracy.

Let’s get to work.

For further information on the ballot initiative laws in your state, click here and then click the state that you live in for further information specific to your area.

Douglas Williams is a third-generation organizer originally from Suffolk, VA. He is a PhD candidate at Wayne State University and works as a labor educator.

AdminJanuary 15, 2020