Democrats usually waste their electoral majorities. So it’s shocking when the party uses its power to actually pass progressive and pro-worker legislation, as it just did in Michigan — including repealing the state’s right-to-work law.
In a
single day alone, ignoring the anguished cries of their Republican counterparts, Michigan’s Democrat-controlled legislature passed a new gun control law, voted to repeal the state’s
unenforceable abortion ban, and enshrined protections for LGBTQ citizens. Significantly, legislation to end the state’s Snyder-era right-to-work law was just
passed through the Michigan house and
senate and is now on its way to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s desk for
approval.
Democratic representative Regina Weiss, the bill’s lead sponsor in the house, made a forceful speech in favor of its passage earlier this month,
arguing: “Right-to-work was never about freedom — it was simply about control,” quoting Martin Luther King Jr’s famous declaration, “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.”
Other Democrats, like Representative Joey Andrews, have similarly
mounted a full-throated case for workers’ rights and against right to work, which Andrews rightly
calls “part of a larger political strategy envisioned by employers, advocated by their allied network of lobbyists and think tanks.”
Particularly in light of recent history, these developments are worth celebrating. Having won a governing trifecta for the first time in nearly half a century, Michigan Democrats are moving with real urgency to implement a progressive and pro-worker agenda. And rather than equivocating or trying to frame that agenda in purely managerial terms, liberal lawmakers like Weiss, Camilleri, and Andrews are actually defending it with clarity and ideological confidence.
Elected Democrats winning political power and wielding it to expand basic rights while rolling back draconian legislation imposed by the Right. What a thought.
