[A newly Democratic state government votes to restore some
democracy in the workplace.]
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MICHIGAN RIGHTS WRONG, BEGINNING THE REPEAL OF ‘RIGHT TO WORK’  
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Harold Meyerson
March 9, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ A newly Democratic state government votes to restore some democracy
in the workplace. _

United Auto Workers members walk in the Labor Day parade in Detroit,
September 2, 2019., PAUL SANCYA / AP PHOTO

 

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.

_MORE FROM HAROLD MEYERSON_
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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 is editor at large of The American Prospect._

_Read the original article at Prospect.org
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* Labor
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* unions
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* democracy
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* organizing
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* Michigan
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* Right to Work
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