Missouri voters decisively rejected an anti-union law on Tuesday, rejecting the state’s Proposition A by a 67.5 to 32.5 margin. The vote was on whether to affirm a so-called “right to work” bill signed in early 2017 by now ex-Gov. Eric Greitens, and voters were not having it. The big Republican loss came despite Republicans having put the measure on the ballot in the relatively low-turnout—and therefore more Republican—primary rather than November’s general election, in an effort to tilt the vote.
The Missouri vote shows—again—that the anti-union laws Republican legislators love so much are not necessarily popular with voters. As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said, the vote shows “How out of touch the Republican legislature in Missouri is, how out of touch the Supreme Court is.” But at the same time, as Washington University sociologist Jake Rosenfeld pointed out to the New York Times’ Noam Scheiber, this is a big win for unions simply by preventing a big step backward. It doesn’t move worker power forward. Additionally, unions spent heavily to get the win, and it remains to be seen if voters will punish the Republicans who passed the anti-union law in the first place. (And, thanks to the Republican strategy of holding this vote on primary day, the decision whether to punish those Republicans will be separated from the policy vote by nearly three months.)
Still, it’s good to win, especially on a law so much at the center of the Republican anti-worker agenda.