[ Democrats usually waste their electoral majorities. So it’s
shocking when the party uses its power to actually pass progressive
and pro-worker legislation, as it just did in Michigan — including
repealing the state’s right-to-work law.]
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DEMOCRATS IN MICHIGAN ARE SHOWING NATIONAL DEMOCRATS HOW TO ACTUALLY
WIELD POWER  
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Luke Savage
March 15, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Democrats usually waste their electoral majorities. So it’s
shocking when the party uses its power to actually pass progressive
and pro-worker legislation, as it just did in Michigan — including
repealing the state’s right-to-work law. _

A gun safety rally outside of the Michigan Capitol in Lansing,
Michigan, on March 15, 2023. The Michigan House of Representatives
passed new gun control laws on March 9., (Michigan Democrats /
Twitter)

 

For several decades now, a basic political dynamic has recurred in
Washington. Afforded political power, Republicans push their agenda as
fiercely and aggressively as possible, using every tool at their
disposal. Among Democrats, something like the opposite is more
typically the case. Awarded a sweeping mandate in 2008 and a governing
trifecta in 2009, to take a recent example, Barack Obama and his
administration refused to go to the mats for the public option
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health care, refrained from overhauling
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financial system, and backed away from
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reforms that would have made it easier for workers to organize unions.

The same has often been true at the state level. As Thomas
Frank observed
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his 2016 book _Listen, Liberal_, many solidly blue states are
effectively governed from the technocratic center-right. After their
landslide midterm victory in 2010, meanwhile, Republicans newly
elected to governors’ mansions and statehouses across America
quickly moved to transform erstwhile Democratic bastions into
laboratories of conservative policy. In both Wisconsin
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Michigan, historic strongholds of the American labor movement, a
barrage of anti-worker laws soon followed.

With a red trifecta at his disposal, Michigan’s then governor Rick
Snyder took aim squarely at the state’s unions and rammed through
sweeping “right-to-work
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legislation. As State Senator Darrin Camilleri described
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There was no hearing, there were no public availabilities. They passed
the entire thing in one day. The governor signed it behind closed
doors because they knew what they were doing was incredibly unpopular.
The people of Michigan did not wanna see a change in our workplace
protections and our union intentions.

Notwithstanding its unpopularity, the effort had the intended effect:
union membership in Michigan has since dropped by 40,000
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density (already down significantly from nearly 30 percent
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1989) had fallen by several percentage points to 15 percent as of last
year, and wages have stagnated
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but well below
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rate of inflation.

Elected with their own governing trifecta last November — the first
of its kind in forty years
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state Democrats are now, refreshingly, pursuing a version of
Snyder’s strategy in reverse. In a single day
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ignoring the anguished cries of their Republican counterparts,
Michigan’s Democrat-controlled legislature passed a new gun control
law, voted to repeal the state’s unenforceable abortion ban
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and enshrined protections for LGBTQ citizens. Significantly,
legislation to end the state’s Snyder-era right-to-work law was
just passed through the Michigan house
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is now on its way to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s desk for approval
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Democratic representative Regina Weiss, the bill’s lead sponsor in
the house, made a forceful speech in favor of its passage earlier this
month, arguing
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“Right-to-work was never about freedom — it was simply about
control,” quoting Martin Luther King Jr’s famous declaration,
“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being
fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to
rob us of our civil rights and job rights.”

Other Democrats, like Representative Joey Andrews, have
similarly mounted a full-throated
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for workers’ rights and against right to work, which Andrews
rightly calls
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of a larger political strategy envisioned by employers, advocated by
their allied network of lobbyists and think tanks.”

Particularly in light of recent history, these developments are worth
celebrating. Having won a governing trifecta for the first time in
nearly half a century, Michigan Democrats are moving with real urgency
to implement a progressive and pro-worker agenda. And rather than
equivocating or trying to frame that agenda in purely managerial
terms, liberal lawmakers like Weiss, Camilleri, and Andrews are
actually defending it with clarity and ideological confidence.

Elected Democrats winning political power and wielding it to expand
basic rights while rolling back draconian legislation imposed by the
Right. What a thought.

Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin. He is the author of The
Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of
History.

* Michigan
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* Democrats
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* progressive change
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