After Michigan Democrats scored their first trifecta of controlling the House, Senate and governor's office in decades this past election, the state is now set to become the first state in six decades to overturn its anti-worker "right-to-work" law.
Democrats in the Michigan House voted on Tuesday to approve a bill repealing right to work in the state, sending the bill to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has pledged to sign the bill into law. The bill passed the Michigan Senate last week in a party line vote.
The bill's passage is a major victory for labor unions, which have long denounced right-to-work laws as stifling workers, hamstringing unions and worsening working conditions. For decades, the tide has been in favor of right-to-work laws — the last time a state repealed a right-to-work law was Indiana, in 1965, only for it to be reinstated in 2012.
"It's huge," Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber told Michigan Radio. "It's huge for the entire labor movement nationally to have a victory for working people and make progress for a change."
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Michigan unions say that the repeal will set the state up to be one of the best states for workers' rights after over a decade of right to work. There are currently 26 other states with right-to-work laws.
For many years, Michigan had the highest rate of unionization in the U.S.; as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found in a recent report, in 2005, the state's unionization rate was 1.7 times the national rate, while the...
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