The Plot to Break Working People

By David McCall
USW International President

John “Tiny” Powell grew up in a union household, attended school with other kids who hailed from union families and learned early on that worker solidarity provided the only real check on corporate greed.

That’s why he put hundreds of miles on his car, knocked on countless doors and spent hours protesting during the successful fight seven years ago to stop union-gutting legislation from taking root in Missouri.

Powell, vice president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 169G, takes pride in that historic victory.

But at the same time, he finds himself in the trenches once more, battling the unprecedented and coordinated wave of threats that working people face right now from corporations and right-wing politicians eager to do their bidding.

CEOs at the nation’s largest companies racked up a staggering $18.9 million apiece in average compensation last year—285 times more than their workers’ median income during the same period, according to new data from the AFL-CIO.  

Yet there’s no limit to their greed.

They’re plotting alongside their political cronies to cram even more into their pockets, break the middle class and create a permanent underclass of workers without economic power or the political clout that goes with it. These new assaults target organized labor, the one mechanism that workers have for fighting back.

“They don’t want the unions,” Powell, a mechanic at Mississippi Lime Co. in Ste. Genevieve, Mo., said of CEOs and Republicans such as Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe and Donald Trump.

“They want to be the ones to say what we make and what we’re worth,” he explained. “They want to dumb us down. But the union has given me the opportunity to step up and say, ‘No, no, I know what I’m worth.’”

Powell plans to travel to Jefferson City, the state capital, in a couple of weeks to protest Republicans’ efforts to ram through legislation that would make it virtually impossible for citizens to set laws through ballot referendums.

It’s no coincidence that this is the very same referendum process that he and others leveraged in 2018 to roll back falsely named “right-to-work” (RTW) legislation, which Republican legislators had passed months earlier at the behest of pro-corporate interests. Legislation like this aims to bankrupt unions and punish the workers who support them.

After the bill took effect, union members and their allies gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures to force a referendum on the law. They also mounted an extensive education campaign—Powell was among the veritable army of union members who hit the road and went door to door—to help voters understand the stakes.

Just as Powell expected, Missourians overwhelmingly voted to kill RTW, safeguard their unions and protect worker power.

But they didn’t stop there. Missouri voters built on that victory by approving another common-sense referendum last fall, this time increasing the minimum wage and mandating paid sick leave.

Instead of respecting that decision, however, Kehoe and Republican lawmakers insulted the voters by repealing the sick leave requirement. It was a blatant favor to big business.

Now, tired of losing referendums fair and square, Kehoe and Republican lawmakers want to rig the system and disenfranchise workers for good. The new bill they’re pushing would enable as few as 5 percent of voters to defeat future ballot questions, the will of the majority be damned.

“It silences us,” Powell explained of this latest attack on democracy.

Republicans and corporations around the country are playing similar games.

Utah recently passed legislation stripping collective bargaining rights from teachers, firefighters and other dedicated public servants. Fortunately, the fed-up workers gathered enough signatures to force a referendum on the issue next year.

South Dakota lawmakers are considering a bill aimed at hindering unions from communicating with workers about problems on the job. And Georgia Republicans narrowly lost a battle that would have withheld taxpayer-funded incentives from companies that refused to obstruct workers’ union drives.

As bad as these attacks are, however, no one poses a greater threat to workers than Trump. Since taking office, he summarily stripped bargaining rights from more than a million federal public servants.

“We could be next,” observed Powell, who fears that Trump will dare to go further, perhaps by targeting private-sector union workers who supply the military or other federal agencies.

“I make the lime that goes into the metal and makes the steel they use,” he explained.

Trump already fired key leaders at the National Labor Relations Board, obstructing the agency’s power to enforce labor law and hold companies accountable. He summarily canceled billions in federal grants that would have created jobs and fueled manufacturing growth. He intends to eliminate critical workplace safety protections, among other affronts to working families.

There’s a nefarious pattern here.

Many of Trump’s anti-worker salvos come right out of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s crackpot plan to hijack democracy and put working people under the feet of CEOs, the ultra-wealthy and other Republican fanatics.

For example, Project 2025 called for decimating the NLRB, just as Trump has begun to do. But it gets much worse. This blueprint for subjecting workers also directs Trump to take further steps to thwart union drives, retaliate against union activists, gut labor rights and hinder contract negotiations.

There’s no reason to put up with any of this.

Workers are already turning the tables. More and more are unionizing, bargaining good contracts, and exercising the kind of collective power that swept Powell and other activists to victory over the pro-corporate hacks in Missouri seven years ago.

“It’s unity. It’s solidarity. It’s strength in each other,” Powell said. “You’re going to see the unions fighting. We stand for what’s right.”