A grassroots rebellion faces down the Koch machine

Welcome to a Sunday night edition of Progress Report.

Earlier today, I held a live stream interview with two activists in Utah who are doing hard, necessary, and very under-the-radar grassroots work to combat the Koch family’s latest scheme. It’s exactly the kind of campaign that progressives and populist have to support if there’s going to be any chance of rising out of this oligarchic hell and building a democracy that empowers working people.

Watch the video above or read all about it below, and please think about donating to their campaign. It’s crunch time for them and I can vouch for their work.

By the way, I hope everyone has been enjoying these video interviews (regardless of. whether you watch them live or after the fact). I love giving people the platform to tell their stories and drawing out the nuances that just wouldn’t fit in print pieces, so the plan is to continue to host these in addition to writing the regular newsletter.

That much work is really only sustainable with financial support, and paid subscriptions haven’t been selling during this economic turmoil, so if want to support this work and have the ability to do so, please consider buying a cheap subscription!

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With new reasons to be outraged and/or terrified emerging every few minutes in Washington DC, why should you care whether municipal sanitation workers in Utah maintain their collective bargaining rights next year?

The better question to ponder is why the Koch-funded Americans for Properity is so deeply invested in making sure that public employees in Utah lose their ability to negotiate a fair contract with the help of their union.

After all, the Koch family are titans of private industry, and don’t have any huge business interests in Utah, so how the state pays its employees should have no impact on their bottom line. Nonetheless, Americans for Prosperity was the main driver of HB 267, which strips the state’s public workers of their bargaining rights. They spent money on public campaigns and private lobbying to convince Republicans to ignore bipartisan uproar and get it done, just barely pushing it over the finish line. (The Koch family also gave $25 million to Utah State University in order to turn it into a factory of libertarianism, which I’m sure helped their cause.)

The parochial explanation for their interest, as one union official explained to me during a live interview today, is that the Kochs and AFP are huge supporters of the school privatization movement and wanted to punish the teachers unions for vocally opposing Utah’s school voucher scheme. The bill’s leading sponsor explicitly mentioned teachers unions over and over again while pushing the legislation, framing it as a way to “reform” them after the unions did not support his previous bills that would have hamstrung them.

Now, Utah’s 39,000 public employees, from teachers to blue collar workers and firefighters, have been cut adrift, left to fend for themselves in negotiations that dictate pay, working conditions, and rights on the job.

If that still doesn’t move you, given everything else that’s happening, consider the bigger picture: right-wing business leaders know better than anybody that organized labor is the one oppositional force designed to correct economic inequality and safeguard the public interest, and this law is a huge step toward gutting the union movement nationwide.

There are now more members of public sector unions than private sector unions, which has made the movement particularly vulnerable. HB 267 made Utah the third state, after North Carolina and South Carolina, to fully ban public unions from bargaining, and there’s every reason — including the support that the law recieved from ALEC, the corporate-sponsored bill writing organization — to believe that this will spark a flurry of similar bills in other red states.

An inspiring grassroots response emerges

There is, however, reason to hope, because the labor movement and a broad coalition of voters from across the political spectrum in Utah are fighting back.

The protests against HB 267 during the legislative process were unprecedented in both size and ferocity in a state not known for a tradition of intense activism. People filled the Capitol to testify and surrounded the building to demonstrate against the bill. As its passage became more likely, people rushed to volunteer for a prospective ballot referendum to repeal it, and on the day that Gov. Spencer Cox signed it into law, there were already 1500 people signed up to collect petition signatures for the Protect Utah Workers initiative.

Earlier today, I spoke with two of the leaders of this movement, AFSCME recording secretary Shykell Ledford and local 1004 President Jerry Philpott. They explained the whole sordid history of the new law and laid out the significant challenges to qualifying an initiative in Utah.

The effort has just 30 days to collect 140,000 valid signatures, meeting required thresholds from at least 26 of the state’s 29 legislative districts. There are minute technicalities on every aspect of the process, down to how the petitions are stapled, and opponents are allowed to review the signatures with a fine tooth comb. What’s more, opponents then have 45 days to try to convince people who signed the petition to withdraw their signatures, a process that AFP is backing.

Still, Ledford and Philpott say they’re confident that they will collect the necessary signatures from each district, and they’re working overtime to gather far more than what’s required to give themselves plenty of buffer. The effort has the full support of the firefighter and police unions, which has afforded the opportunity to build an unusual coalition that labor has largely avoided.

There are eight days to go before the deadline, and if they can get this initiative qualified, it has a good chance of passing in November 2026 despite the amount of money that will be poured into misinformation campaigns to take it down. And while it’s essential for workers in Utah that they’re able to get this over the line, this initiative would also send a clear message to politicians who are considering similar laws.

A victory here would also be galvanizing to workers in red states, who have been under the thumb of bad politicians and bad bosses for all of history. This isn’t just about unions; more important is the notion that it’s not only possible to push back against billionaire-funded encroachment on one’s rights, but through activism and solidarity, it’s possible to win, too.

For more information on how you can help out Protect Utah Workers — including ways to donate to their grassroots movement, which faces up to 20 more months of hard work against enormously wealthy forces — check out their website.

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