Right-to-Work Defeated by Missouri Voters - Bigly!
August 2018 - Over the past twenty years, some of our friends in Missouri seem to have forgotten that their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had regularly voted for Richard Gephardt, Stuart Symington, Harry Truman, and other good Democrats. But they came back home in big numbers for this summer's primary election.
In a stunning slap at Republicans and their big-money corporate backers, Missouri voters rejected the so called "right-to-work" laws imposed on them in 2017 by the state's GOP lawmakers and newly-elected Republican Governor Eric Greitens. And the vote wasn't even close. By a 2-to-1 margin Missourians said no to one of the bedrock principles of conservative Republicans.
 (Truman quote from pinterest)
While "pro-business" groups and Republicans have tried to argue that their right-to-work, anti-union measures will help bring jobs to a state and eventually will help workers, most economic studies disagree. Those studies have found that, after a state enacts right-to-work laws, average wages in that state at best are flat, but they usually fall. To the extent anyone does benefit from these laws, the studies found the primary beneficiaries to be business owners.
{The studies referenced include ones from Hofstra University, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Economic Policy Institute, and the University of Missouri - Kansas City.}
Most economists cite the decline in union strength as one of the main reasons that workers' wages have stagnated over the past 35 years, while salaries of executives have continued to rise. An interesting statistic from multiple sources (we've read it in a Forbes contributor column and from Vox.com among other sources) illustrates this point. In the 1950's and 1960's, the average CEO salary was roughly 20 times that of the average worker. As of a few years ago, the average CEO was making close to 300 times that of the average worker.
But these studies haven't deterred Republicans from continuing to push right-to-work in Missouri and elsewhere in the county. With a Democrat in the Governor's Mansion prior to 2017, Missouri Republicans had been unable to force right-to-work there, but things sure changed quickly following the Greitens election. Before you knew it, the legislation had been passed and then signed into law.
As we've said for a long time, when the focus is on economics, Americans know the score: the Republicans support the already wealthy, while the Democrats support the rest of us. The Republicans' philosophy has a history of damaging the economy, while the Democrats have a history of cleaning up the mess left by the GOP. That's why Republican always try running on divisive "hot button" issues, rather than on their economic record. Or, in the case of Donald Trump, not only running on divisive issues, but also trying to take credit for and run on the strong Democratic economy he inherited.
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