JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – With the failure of last year’s Right-to-Work bill to make it into law and the stagnation of the paycheck protection bill currently in the House, unions appear victorious on key battles the last two sessions despite a Republican supermajority.
But a new development indicates the Humphreys family will only ramp up their efforts against organized labor and their allies with an “R” next to their name.
The Committee for Accountable Government in Missouri (CAGM) announced Wednesday that it would begin a new advertising campaign used to inform union workers how to stop paying union dues by holding a “decertification election,” which is a vote to remove a union as the workplace’s exclusive collective bargaining representative.
“Workers need to know they don’t have to pay union dues,” Brandon Moody, a spokesman for the Committee, said. “They don’t have to subject themselves to political spending with which they may not agree, and they don’t have to let anyone take dues from their paycheck if they don’t want.”
Mike Louis, the president of the Missouri AFL-CIO, says that workers are informed of all of their rights each year by their labor organizations and that Humphreys attempts are an effort to misinform some workers.
“This is just another attack by a rich corporate outsider who has nothing to do with labor organizations, trying to buy influence with his megamillion bank accounts,” he said.
The campaign will include TV and radio spots (the latter of which can be heard here and here), as well as online in St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, and Cape Girardeau – all areas with the largest concentrations of pro-union Republicans.
The new ads are just the next phase in efforts to curtail union membership and influence by CAGM, which is owned by David and Debra Humphreys. The group made headlines last year when it was formed to combat Republican representatives who had voted against Right-to-Work, and when it began its first advertising campaign deriding those same legislators.
UPDATED: April 27, 2015 at 11:11 a.m. with comments from Louis.
