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MARCH 9, 2023
Meyerson on TAP
Michigan Rights Wrong, Beginning the Repeal of 'Right to Work'
A newly Democratic state government votes to restore some democracy in
the workplace.
A big part of the decades-long radicalization of the Republican Party
has been the embrace by Northern-state Republicans of the
neo-Confederate positions and policies of the Republican neo-Dixiecrat
South. In 2011, that embrace expanded to include the South's longtime
war on adequately paid labor in general (see: slavery) and unions in
particular. Wisconsin's newly elected Republican governor, Scott
Walker, took up arms against his state's unions, effectively ending
collective bargaining for the state's public-sector workers and then
passing a "right to work" law, enabling private-sector workers to
receive the benefits of their union's collectively bargained raises
and benefits while exempting them from paying any dues to their
union-a measure that invariably weakens worker and union power. As
Wisconsin had been the first state to legalize collective bargaining for
state employees, this marked a historic overturning of the state's
social contract.
An even more historic overturning soon followed on the other side of
Lake Michigan. Michigan, after all, had been the birthplace of American
mass unionization, as its historic 1937 sit-down strike of the United
Auto Workers had been the breakthrough in workers' efforts to unionize
American manufacturing and inaugurated the mid-20th-century era of
countervailing union power. In 2012, however, the Republican-controlled
Michigan legislature passed a right-to-work law of its own, which the
Republican governor then signed into law.
History, however, has a way of reversing itself, and history in
democracies can be swayed by the mobilization of popular will. Last
November, Michigan voters returned Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to
office and turned out the majority-Republican legislature in favor of a
majority-Democratic one. And yesterday, that legislature's lower house
voted to repeal the state's decade-old right-to-work law and to
reinstate the law (which those Republicans had also abolished in 2012)
requiring that workers be paid the "prevailing wage" (in effect, a
union-level living wage) when working on publicly funded construction
projects. Those two bills will soon likely be passed by the state's
Senate and signed by Gov. Whitmer. The move also enhances Whitmer's
bona fides as a national Democratic leader, one whose name invariably
comes up among Democratic activists and pundits in discussions of who
the Democrats
**should**be running for president next year.
This year's revival of union fortunes in the onetime cradle of
unionism may not yet be complete. The UAW-once America's pre-eminent
union and the only social democratic institution in American history to
have wielded real power-had fallen on bad times in recent years, with
production offshored, membership greatly reduced, and any number of
union leaders, including two past presidents, doing hard time for
dipping into the union's treasury to fund modestly lavish lifestyles.
In response, the Justice Department went to court demanding changes in
union governance, and a consent decree between the union and the DOJ
called for electing its officers through rank-and-file elections rather
than at national conventions, as had been the practice. Those elections
have now been completed, and an insurgent reformer ticket has won all
but one of the posts it sought on the union's governing board, and is
leading for the final slot, that of union president. Reform candidate
Shawn Fain holds a 645-vote lead over incumbent president Ray Curry out
of the nearly 140,000 votes cast, but 1,608 challenged ballots have yet
to be counted.
The swing of Michigan back into the pro-union column and the prospect of
a revived UAW may both be part of the larger movement in public
sentiment, which last year reached the highest approval ratings for
unions (over 70 percent), as measured by both Gallup and Pew, since the
mid-1960s. None of that, alas, is sufficient to restore the modicum of
worker power that can only come with a vibrant union movement. That will
require a strengthening of labor law to again give workers an
unencumbered right to join unions, which business and
Republican-dominated courts and administrations have stripped away over
the past 60 years. That said, let's hope what's happening in
Michigan this week doesn't stay just in Michigan.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
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