Missouri CWAers, Coalition Stop Legislature's Anti-Union Bills

Phone Bank Volunteers Route 5,000 Calls to Capitol to Kill Paycheck Deception

A hugely successful phone bank helped Missouri CWAers send lawmakers home empty-handed last Friday, the end of a legislative session that began with the Republican majority pledging to pass a laundry list of anti-union, anti-worker bills.

Above, CWA Local 6355 President Bradley Harmon marches with members at Missouri state capitol on Lobby Day. Below, Missouri activists prepare to head out for a day of canvassing in May, one of the activities that helped defeat their legislature's anti-union bills. Union members and allies around the table include CWA Local 6355 Secretary-Treasurer Catrina Hill and Organizing Coordinator Richard von Glahn.

“We feel like we stopped a speeding train that was headed right at us,” said Bradley Harmon, president of CWA Local 6355, which represents 7,000 state workers. “None of us thought we’d be able to end the session like this.”

In January, Harmon said, Republicans “were going after everything, not just the big issues of paycheck deception and right to work, but project labor agreements, prevailing wage laws, teacher tenure. It was an all-out attack and they got nothing, zero.”

CWA, other unions and allies staged large protests at the capitol early in the session, making it clear that attacks on workers would face fierce opposition.

In April, CWA and the Missouri Progressive Vote Coalition turned up the heat again to kill the paycheck deception bill, designed to weaken unions and silence the voice of workers in politics by banning automatic payroll deduction of union dues. A phone bank, as well as the efforts of volunteers knocking on doors, sent 5,000 calls to lawmakers’ offices.

“We were patching through calls right up until 3 p.m. on the last day of the session,” Local 6355 Organizing Coordinator Richard von Glahn said. “The calls very clearly moved a lot of Republicans to vote against the bill, and ultimately created such a concern among the Republican caucus that it didn’t come up on the final day.”

Both the Senate and House had passed versions of the bill, but no final version was brought up for a vote. “We had members at the capitol doing lobbying on the last day and some of the lawmakers told them that every single phone call they were getting on the bill was telling them to oppose it,” von Glahn said.

The so-called “right to work” bill never came up for a vote at all and other anti-worker legislation either failed on the floor or simply vanished.

As good as the victory feels, Harmon said he’s not letting down his guard. “We anticipate that we will have to fight every one of these fights again next year, and that the other side is going to be coming at us even harder than they did this year,” he said.

Between now and then, he said, the challenge will be to keep the coalition strong and active. “The relationships we’re building are fantastic,” he said. “The Sierra Club was in Jeff City lobbying on our issues with us on Lobby Day, and we also had participation from the NAACP for the first time.”

CWA also worked in tandem with other unions, even on issues that didn’t directly affect CWA members. “One of the things we’ve learned is that we have to view every assault that is going after workers as an assault on us,” Harmon said. “That was a really key to our being able to mount the kind of opposition that we did.”