Right wing groups crowed, saying union restrictions in the home of the auto industry meant the labor movement was on its last legs. They talked about which states would go next.

And then, nothing.

Well, not nothing. But what anti-worker pundits said would be a domino effect was more like a cricket effect. In 2013, no state passed a “right to work” law.

Incorrectly-named “right to work” laws put restrictions on contracts union workers can make with employers. They ban fair share clauses which require that workers pay dues to have the protection of the union. Unions are left in the position of providing services without being able to fund those services, and they starve.

“Right to work” laws have nothing to do with freedom. They are simply a tactic to defund unions and weaken the ability of workers to advocate for themselves. And it shows: states with “right to work” laws have lower wages, higher poverty rates, and more workplace injuries and fatalities than free bargaining states.

In 2013, workers didn’t stand for it.

In Missouri, where Republicans controlled supermajorities in both the state House and Senate, some legislators pursued a “paycheck deception” bill, which restricts unions’ ability to make political contributions. Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones (R-Eureka) called it a step toward a “right to work law.” Based heavily on an ALEC model bill, paycheck deception moved swiftly through Republican-lead committees.

But workers, union and non-union (including hundreds of Working America members), made their voices heard. Emails, letters, and phone calls flooded legislative offices in Jefferson City. The bill passed the Senate after an 8-hour Democratic filibuster, but House legislators were getting skittish. Bill proponents were having a hard time answering simple questions about why additional restrictions on union dues were needed. Support for the bill dwindled with each test vote.

“Paycheck deception” passed the House by a narrower than expected margin, and Speaker Jones prepared to move on to “right to work.” But Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed paycheck deception, calling it unnecessary. By the September veto session, too many moderate Republicans had abandoned the effort, and the bill died outright.

Did Republicans get the message? Absolutely not. In December special session centered around tax incentives for Boeing, a small group tried and failed to insert “right to work” language. ALEC member Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Springfield) called it “a good opportunity to begin that fight” ahead of 2014.

In Ohio, the anti-union effort has centered around gathering petitions to get “right to work” on the 2014 ballot. As we know, you need to get a certain number of signatures to get an issue on the ballot. For Ohio, that number is 385,000, and you always want extra signatures in case some are validated.

The Tea Party group Ohioans for Workplace Freedom started circulating petitions in February 2012. After 20 months, they announced they have collected 100,000 signatures.

At this rate, as Ohio bloggers at Plunderbund noted, the anti-union group would need 40 m0re months to put “right to work” on the ballot. And since they’ve already burned through $118,000 in paid petition gatherers, chances are they’d run out of money first.

Let’s compare that with 2011, when Gov. John Kasich and Republicans in the legislative rammed through the union-busting Senate Bill 5. The bill passed on March 30. On June 29, after only 3 months, We Are Ohio delivered 1.3 million signatures to the Secretary of State to get a repeal of SB 5 on the ballot. In November, SB 5 was repealed by 60 percent of voters.

What’s going on here? What the Tea Party and the anti-union forces in Ohio don’t get is that once you get past a small group of billionaires and right-wing ideologues, there is no desire to restrict collective bargaining in Ohio. None. People are looking for good jobs, affordable health care, and decent schools to send their kids.

Meanwhile, the 2011 battle over Senate Bill 5, largely ignored by the national media, still reverberates throughout the Buckeye State. Treasurer Josh Mandel, a Republican supporter of SB 5, lost a Senate bid despite more than $19 million in outside aide. Mitt Romney haplessly flip-flopped on SB 5 and consistently delivered an anti-union message, lost in Ohio in part because of union members of all political stripes voting for his opponent. And in 2013, SB 5 supporter Toledo Mayor Mike Bell was ousted, while a Tea Party-backed pension-cutting amendment was rejected in Cincinnati by a 57-point margin.

In Oregon, the story is even shorter.  An Portland attorney named Jill Gibson Odell is sponsoring a “right to work” initiative in her state. Odell is excited about the “national money to be had” to assist her campaign, so she’s not even pretending “right to work” is something Oregonians themselves want. In 2013, little to no progress was made on getting the issue on the ballot, and popular Gov. John Kitzhaber said he will publicly oppose it. Meanwhile, workers in Portland got paid sick days, and a statewide sick leave ordinance is expected to pass in 2014.

What to expect in 2014? Well, as the AP reports, the main targets for “right to work” proponents are Missouri, Ohio, and Oregon, showing that these folks have learned nothing from the past year. While their efforts stall, Americans of all political persuasions are starting to support minimum wage increases, sick leave, wage theft protections, and progressive tax codes in increasing numbers.

Working America will be vigilant to mobilize against any “right to work” measure, wherever it crops up. But make no mistake: Michigan wasn’t the start of a domino effect. It was a wake up call. And outside the right-wing think tank bubble, American workers are fully awake.

Main Street

Teamsters Local 89 members at United Parcel Service Inc. again are voting on a regional contract called the Central Region Supplement.

The regional contract covers geographically specific work rules, seniority and grievance procedures and acts as a supplement to a national contract between Teamsters and UPS, Mike Mangeot, manager of public relations for Louisville-based UPS Airlines, said in an email.

Voting began yesterday and continues through Oct. 9.

Union members rejected a regional contract supplement offer early this summer, as Business First reported. But UPS and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters agreed to an indefinite extension of their current national master agreement and supplements.

“While under the contract extension, it is business as usual at UPS while the vote and negotiations continue,” Mangeot wrote. “Any suggestions of potential disruptions during this period have no merit.”

Teamsters Local 89 president Fred Zuckerman also could not be reached immediately for comment.

According to the Teamster’s website, there is not support for the regional supplement.

Union members held a meeting earlier this month and unanimously accepted a motion to again vote no on the supplement, a post on the site said.

The post said the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, rather than local 89, is leading the negotiations with UPS and “the membership has seen only token attempts to resolve the many issues still lingering throughout the proposed Central Region Supplement.”

Among concerns listed on the website are that the supplement contains “dangerous language” that gives UPS “almost unlimited power to terminate employees for anything the company deems a ‘serious offense.’” The post also references modifications to the union’s TeamCare health care plan, saying it lacks many of the key benefits members and their families have come to rely upon.

“Current full-time employees under TeamCare will have an inferior plan to both part-time and new full-time employees if the package is not further modified,” it says.

Atlanta-based UPS (NYSE: UPS) is Louisville’s largest private-sector employer with more than 20,000 full-time equivalent workers. The company operates its largest air sorting hub, Worldport, and a ground operation, Centennial Hub, in Louisville.

Teamsters Local 89 represents about 8,800 workers at Worldport and about 1,900 in the company’s ground operations, Zuckerman said in a previous interview.

Another union agreement, called the Louisville Air Rider, remains in negotiations, so it is not up for consideration, according to Mangeot.

“As always, UPS continues to negotiate a contract that rewards our employees while protecting our competitive position,” he wrote.

Lewis and Hillman’s motion to organize factory workers was put to a vote and lost. They were not happy. Indeed, Lewis decked Big Bill Hutchinson, the president of the Carpenters, and stormed out—to form the CIO, a labor organization pledged to organize factory workers and that organized millions of them over the next couple of years.

No such dramatics attended yesterday’s proceedings, but the delegate who harked back to 1935 had a point. The issues before this year’s AFL-CIO convention, like the issues before the convention 78 years ago, concern opening labor’s ranks to a whole new group of workers—disproportionately minority, immigrant, and female. There was an ethno-cultural dimension to the factory-worker debate of 1935 as well: The AFL trade unions (though not the Mine and Clothing Workers) consisted disproportionately of men of Northwestern European descent, while the factory workers were often of Southern and Eastern European descent. Some were even black or, horror of horrors, women. Opening labor’s ranks to these workers was something that many in the AFL would simply not countenance.

No such hard and fast racial or gender lines were apparent in yesterday’s debate. Many of today’s unions are already heavily minority, immigrant, and female. Some of the union leaders who have been the most skeptical about allowing organizations that aren’t unions onto labor’s governing bodies have taken a leading role in the fight for immigration reform, most particularly Terry O’Sullivan of the Laborers.

Indeed, the most striking thing about this year’s AFL-CIO convention is that it’s the first one I’ve attended—I daresay, the first one, period—that hasn’t looked like a sea of middle-aged white guys. America’s unions have long had racially diverse and multi-gender memberships, but it’s taken a while for that diversity to reach the movement’s topmost ranks (AFL-CIO conventions draw their delegates from the leaders of the federation’s 50-plus unions). Today, the AFL-CIO’s two largest affiliates are headed by an African American man and a Jewish lesbian. Tefere Gebre, who will be elected the Federation’s executive vice president in balloting tomorrow, is a political refugee from Ethiopia who came to the United States as a teenager.

The resolutions enacted today, which commits the Federation to place almost as much emphasis on community coalition-building as it does on the increasingly impossible task of conventional union organizing, only furthers the impression of a movement in demographic as well as functional transition. In what I think was an unprecedented move, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka allowed three prominent allies of labor, including National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill, to speak for the resolution, even though none were delegates or, for that matter, union members.

So, yes—by virtue of both the fundamental shift in strategy and the implications that shift has for further changing labor’s demographics, this week’s convention is a lot like 1935’s. With a signal difference, however: The changes of ’35 could only take place once the Federation split. The changes this week have clear majority support, though at some level they pose an existential threat to both a stereotype and some actual people: the labor boss of legend, old, white, male, and puffing a cigar.