One of the most significant bills to strengthen workers’ abilities to organize in the past 80 years passed the House on Thursday, the latest sign of momentum for the labor movement.
In 1887, African-American cane workers in Louisiana attempted to organize-and many paid with their lives. The massacre helped keep unions out of the South at just the moment it was industrializing. Today the workforce remains predominantly non-union.
Organized labor hopes the huge Missouri win will help stop the spread of the anti-union laws. “I want people across the country to know that you don’t need to sell out,” Rashida Tlaib said. “You don’t have to change who you are to run for office...”
After an all out effort by the labor movement, voters in Missouri rejected "right to work" legislation by a 2-1 margin. This reprised a labor victory from 40 years ago when voters rejected similar anti-worker legislation.
I’m nervously awaiting the Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, which would weaken public sector unions by letting workers receive the benefits of representation without contributing toward the cost.
But I’ve got a unique vantage point: I work in the same building as the plaintiff.
Union organizers in states like Tennessee are hoping to change that. Since 2010, the number of union members in Tennessee has grown from 115,000 to 155,000. Still, only 5.7 percent of Tennessee workers are members of a union.How To Patrick Green, even one new member is a big deal. Green is a president of Local 1235, which is part of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Nashville, Tennessee. In the three years that he has been leading the union, the local’s membership rate went up by 36 percent, despite being in a right-to-work state.
Labor leaders in the U.S. have made it clear they are supportive of a NAFTA overhaul — but only if it helps eliminate the wage gap with Mexico and includes Canada’s long-shot demands for labor reform.
If New Hampshire, Missouri and Kentucky succeed in enacting "right-to-work" bills, it would be the most states rolling back union power in one year since 1947, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Success in New Hampshire would also make it the first state in the Northeast with a "right-to-work" law. The bills are a further reflection of organized labor's falling clout. Just 10.7 percent of American workers belonged to a labor union in 2016.
That states can pass laws banning mandatory union dues is not new. Congress amended labor law in 1947 to allow individual states to pass right-to-work laws.
“How it affects the workforce is really simple: It lowers wages,” said Stephen Herzenberg, executive director of the Keystone Research Center. “If you strip it to its core, this is about reducing the power of workers to bargain for a decent living.”
Unions were finally on an upswing. Now, they’re staring down the barrel of the GOP’s gun.
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