Missouri voters rise up to defeat GOP's anti-worker law
Trump ‘loves’ this anti-union law, but voters didn’t.
Trump won the state of Missouri by almost 20 points in 2016, but this week voters in that state rejected an anti-union law that Trump championed, and they did so by a crushing margin.
On Tuesday, a referendum on a so-called “Right to Work” law in Missouri was defeated by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. The unofficial vote tally as of Wednesday morning was 32.5 percent voting yes on Proposition A — and a whopping 67.5 percent voting against it.
“Right to work” laws are actually designed to weaken unions and depress wages by requiring unions to represent employees who don’t pay dues. Such laws are currently in effect in 27 states, and the Missouri legislature had passed one in 2017 as well. A petition drive forced the law to be suspended until the people of Missouri could weigh in.
As a candidate, Trump said he supported “Right to Work” laws, telling an interviewer, “I like right to work. My position on right to work is 100 percent.”
He also bragged that “I fight unions very hard. But there are certain areas of the country where you only have unions. You don’t have a right-to-work state. I like the right to work.”
Since taking office, Trump has also said that he supports a national “Right to Work” law that would strip unions of the right to collect mandatory dues, and a number of Trump’s judicial nominees have come from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, an organization dedicated to gutting workers’ power to bargain collectively.
But voters in Missouri rejected the Trump-backed law by a humiliating margin, a defeat that Republicans should have seen coming. The petition that created the ballot referendum got three times the number of signatures required.
And in February, Democrat Mike Revis flipped a seat in a district Trump carried by 28 points, in part by campaigning against “Right to Work.”
Revis called the law “a 60-year-old bad idea, pushed by big corporations to lower wages.”
The defeat of “Proposition A” is a major victory for workers, and hopefully just the first of many.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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