Missouri’s right-to-work vote: Boon or boondoggle?

Without right-to-work protections currently offered in 27 states, you pay the union or lose your job. It’s very simple.

Unions across the country declared victory late Tuesday as numbers rolled in from Missouri showing voters struck down the state’s pending right-to-work law.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called it a “tremendous achievement.”

Is this a sea change for unions in the Midwest? A signal that worker freedom will forever be squashed in non-right-to-work Illinois?

No.

In fact, the union strategy in Illinois’ southwestern neighbor should leave some rank-and-file members scratching their heads. The victory was expensive, potentially short-lived and may even cut against some of the unions’ other political priorities.

It’s yet another reason workers might want to keep more of their paychecks in their own pockets, rather than seeing those dollars thrown away on political crapshoots.

Some background: In February 2017, now-disgraced former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens signed a right-to-work bill into law.

A right-to-work law doesn’t change collective bargaining. It doesn’t change union representation. It doesn’t even necessarily weaken unions, especially if they treat members well. It only does one thing: right to work allows workers to withhold their money from a union if they don’t feel like it is representing his or her interests effectively.

Without right-to-work protections currently offered in 27 states, you pay the union or lose your job. It’s very simple.

Unlike Illinois, Missouri gives motivated citizens a fighting chance to serve as a check on the state legislature. So following Greitens’ signature, unions rounded up 300,000 signatures to block the law’s implementation until voters had a choice at the ballot box.

To say unions outspent right-to-work proponents would be an understatement. It was an avalanche.

The union-backed We Are Missouri Coalition raised more than $16 million from labor organizations and spent nearly $7 million on ads in July alone. They outspent two opposing groups combined by a nearly 5 to 1 margin, according to the Wall Street Journal’s analysis of state filings.

With that money, unions secured a landslide victory.

Or did they?

An important thing to note about the Missouri case is that Greitens could not have played more into unions’ hands.

Too eager to pass a landmark reform, he gave organizers most of the spring and all of the summer to gather signatures. Any first-year lobbyist would have taken a different tack. State lawmakers could have waited to vote on a right-to-work bill until the last day of session in mid-May, waited to send the bill to the governor until the end of May and then Greitens could have sat on it well into July before signing, thus giving motivated interests just a few weeks to gather signatures – rather than six months.

Unfortunately for union members who saw millions of dollars in dues money flow to this fight, that gamesmanship is still very much on the table. If Missouri Republicans hold on to their supermajorities in November, which is not unlikely, a right-to-work bill will certainly bubble up yet again in 2019.

And that brings us to the electoral angle.

Missouri U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill is perhaps the most vulnerable Democratic senator in the country. Millions of union dollars that flowed to the right-to-work battle will no longer go to support her. And millions of dollars that weren’t spent trying to outmaneuver unions in that fight will flow to her opponent, Republican Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley.

Despite the right-to-work proposition being the star of the primary election, Missouri Republicans cast about 60,000 more votes than Missouri Democrats statewide. That’s not a good sign for McCaskill.

So at the end of the day, what did union members get in exchange for millions of dollars?

An opportunity for union officials to pat themselves on the back, a weaker position in a key congressional race and a few more months, though possibly years, of compulsory dues.

Was it worth it?

Private sector union members in right-to-work states have reason to ask themselves that question, because they have a choice in whether to fund those fights.

Missouri’s private sector union members have little reason to, because they still don’t.