Portside

John “Tiny” Powell grew up in a union household, attended school with other kids who hailed from union families and learned early on that worker solidarity provided the only real check on corporate greed.

That’s why he put hundreds of miles on his car, knocked on countless doors and spent hours protesting during the successful fight seven years ago to stop union-gutting legislation from taking root in Missouri.

Powell, vice president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 169G, takes pride in that historic victory.

But at the same time, he finds himself in the trenches once more, battling the unprecedented and coordinated wave of threats that working people face right now from corporations and right-wing politicians eager to do their bidding.

CEOs at the nation’s largest companies racked up a staggering $18.9 million apiece in average compensation last year — 285 times more than their workers’ median income during the same period, according to new data from the AFL-CIO.

Yet there’s no limit to their greed.

They’re plotting alongside their political cronies to cram even more into their pockets, break the middle class and create a permanent underclass of workers without economic power or the political clout that goes with it. These new assaults target organized labor, the one mechanism that workers have for fighting back.

“They don’t want the unions,” Powell, a mechanic at Mississippi Lime Co. in Ste. Genevieve, Mo., said of CEOs and Republicans such as Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe and Donald Trump.

“They want to be the ones to say what we make and what we’re worth,” he explained. “They want to dumb us down. But the union has given me the opportunity to step up and say, ‘No, no, I know what I’m worth.’”

Powell plans to travel to Jefferson City, the state capital, in a couple of weeks to protest Republicans’ efforts to ram through legislation that would make it virtually impossible for citizens to set laws through ballot referendums.

It’s no coincidence that this is the very same referendum process that he and others leveraged in 2018 to roll back falsely named “right-to-work” (RTW) legislation, which Republican legislators had passed months earlier at the behest of pro-corporate interests. Legislation like this aims to bankrupt unions and punish the workers who support them.

After the bill took effect, union members and their allies gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to force a referendum on the law. They also mounted an extensive education campaign — Powell was among the veritable army of union members who hit the road and went door to door — to help voters understand the stakes.

Just as Powell expected, Missourians overwhelmingly voted to kill RTW, safeguard their unions and protect worker power.

Powell plans to travel to Jefferson City, the state capital, in a couple of weeks to protest Republicans’ efforts to ram through legislation that would make it virtually impossible for citizens to set laws through ballot referendums.

It’s no coincidence that this is the very same referendum process that he and others leveraged in 2018 to roll back falsely named “right-to-work” (RTW) legislation, which Republican legislators had passed months earlier at the behest of pro-corporate interests. Legislation like this aims to bankrupt unions and punish the workers who support them.

After the bill took effect, union members and their allies gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to force a referendum on the law. They also mounted an extensive education campaign — Powell was among the veritable army of union members who hit the road and went door to door — to help voters understand the stakes.

Just as Powell expected, Missourians overwhelmingly voted to kill RTW, safeguard their unions and protect worker power.