e previously reported on some of the major victories for the labor movement taking place in the State of Michigan, and we learned a lot about what has happened from Democrat State Representative Joey Andrews during his interview on The Valley Labor Report. But now we want to look beyond “what has happened?” to “what is ahead?”
Andrews feels strongly that labor issues are not a separate category from some of the other major issues going on that would be categorized as “social justice”; instead, Andrews believes that it is all interconnected.
So what exactly does this mean? What’s next? And how can Michigan workers build on these victories?
“There’s two things that we’ve been doing that I think have been pretty effective,” Andrews said. “One is that our governor and our legislature also has taken to messaging around even social issues as being worker and workplace safety. So we recently expanded our state’s civil rights act to include protection for LGBTQ people; up until that effectively becomes law, it’s been legal in Michigan for employers to fire somebody for being gay or trans. And so we rectified that, and the message that we’ve sent forward is that these social issues, these civil rights issues, are economic and workplace issues that People need to feel safe in their jobs, they need to feel protected in their jobs. And so repealing our abortion ban, expanding our civil rights act; these aren’t just matters of civil rights and social justice, these are fundamentally economic issues.”
This messaging campaign has already been proving to be quite successful, as reflected in polling and voter turnout.
“The second thing is that we’ve been kind of taking a broadly wholistic look at all of these anti-labor laws; so aside from repealing ‘Right to Work’ and reinstating prevailing wage, we’ve got a bill that’s been moving through to start to rectify restricted terms of bargaining for teachers,” Andrews explained. “There’s a pretty terrible law that we’ve got that doesn’t require schools to compensate teachers if contract negotiations run past the deadline date, which effectively neuters teachers’ ability to bargain.” One of the bills Andrew referred to would remove this restriction.
Andrews also remarked that a huge goal for him that he is working toward is what’s known as “Co-determination,” which would effectively give workers more of a voice in the workplace when it comes to certain work-related decisions. According to Andrews, Co-determination can take on various forms in the workplace, from shopfloor decisions to safety standards to budgeting, and more. This would be an amazing step towards bringing more power back to the workers, where it rightfully belongs.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. For more information on what’s going on in Michigan, watch the full interview on YouTube: