Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Missouri’s Republican lawmakers did exactly what their corporate patrons demanded in 2017 and rammed through legislation intended to prevent working people from banding together to fight for better lives.
This gift to the ultra-wealthy prompted a furious backlash, with members of the United Steelworkers (USW) and other Missourians turning out in force in 2018 to pass a citizen-driven referendum overturning the odious law.
You might have expected the corporate loyalists in the General Assembly to be humbled by this stinging rebuke. You might even have thought that the errant legislators would correct course and start doing their jobs the right way after being dealt such a blow.
But no, they’re now doubling down and trying to rig the system so that it’s much more difficult for the pesky voters to weigh in from now on. They want to raise the threshold for passing a citizen-initiated constitutional amendment, from a majority of votes statewide to a majority in every single congressional district, meaning a tiny group of naysayers could scuttle a proposal favored by everyone else.
Thwarting referendums in this way means usurping the will of the people, but it’s all just another day at the office for a growing number of anti-worker lawmakers around the country. Their message to voters: Shut your mouths or we’ll shut them for you.
It’s important to remember that we have a fundamental right to petition and redress the government—and that includes gathering enough signatures to put an issue on the ballot and then throwing the matter in front of the entire electorate for a yes-or-no decision. The referendum enables us to take the wheel, especially when our elected representatives fail to do what’s right or act against our interests.
Speaking of which, Missouri Republicans remain angry about the 2018 rollback of their falsely named “right-to-work” law, aimed at diluting worker power, decimating unions, and deepening corporate control.
The USW and other pro-worker organizations gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures—far more than the number required—to force a referendum challenging the anti-worker measure. Then we put boots on the ground, mobilizing our activists in a door-to-door outreach effort that drove voters to the polls and killed the law before it even took effect.
But the pro-worker advocacy didn’t stop there.
Buoyed by that success, union members and other activists pushed through other referendums, including a commonsense measure in 2024 providing paid sick leave that Missouri workers need to care for themselves and sick loved ones.
This made the Republican legislators angrier than before. They promptly rescinded the paid sick leave requirement, saying they knew better than the voters.
Now, by trying to obstruct the referendum process, the same lawmakers want to silence voters and solidify their own control. It’s the only way they can advance an agenda that benefits the rich even as working people struggle to make ends meet.
Even worse, Republicans in other states mounted their own attacks on voters. Here are a few examples:
– After Oklahomans approved a referendum expanding Medicaid, the Republican legislature and governor retaliated in 2025 with a law making it more difficult to gather the signatures required for future ballot initiatives. From here on out, supporters may collect only a certain number of signatures in each county, denying a voice to millions of voters statewide.
– Republicans in South Dakota passed a law in 2025 shortening the signature-gathering period to make the process more cumbersome and kill off as many ballot initiatives as possible. They’re back at it in 2026, trying to jack up the threshold for passing constitutional amendments to 60 percent of votes cast instead of the simple majority currently required.
– No one’s gone further to muzzle voters than the Republican lawmakers and governor in Florida, who authorized astronomical fees to “validate” every signature that’s collected to get a referendum on the ballot. This farcical requirement dooms many initiatives from the get-go, just as they intended.
Make no mistake, USW members and our allies fight these assaults on our rights.
For example, the Republicans in Missouri can only enact their restrictive changes to the citizen-driven process if the voters approve them—in a referendum, ironically—in August.
USW activists have hit the streets to educate voters about the stakes and to generate the turnout needed to bury this proposal for good.
That’s only one battleground. A federal court in Arkansas just sided with voters who sued over absurd restrictions on ballot initiatives in that state. And USW members and other voters in Ohio stopped lawmakers cold when they tried to kill referendums there a few years ago.
Sooner or later, anti-worker lawmakers will learn that there’s no silencing voters like us. The harder they try, the louder we get.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
