AFL-CIO Defeats Right-to-Work Campaigns in Five of Six States, Major Democratic Resistance Victory

The AFL-CIO achieves a major victory in its confrontation with the National Right-to-Work Committee’s coordinated efforts to extend right-to-work laws to six additional states through ballot initiatives. Union organizing and voter mobilization efforts result in the defeat of right-to-work proposals in five of the six states where campaigns were mounted: California, Ohio, Washington, Idaho, and Colorado. Only Kansas approves a right-to-work measure in the 1958 elections. This represents one of labor’s most significant defensive victories against the corporate-funded anti-union movement in the postwar period, demonstrating that organized labor can successfully resist systematic right-to-work campaigns when unions invest resources in voter education and political mobilization.

The 1958 right-to-work defeats occur during a period when union membership stands near its historic peak at approximately 35 percent of the workforce, giving organized labor substantial political power and resources to mount effective opposition campaigns. The AFL-CIO’s success is achieved through coordinated efforts across state labor federations, with unions investing heavily in advertising, canvassing, and get-out-the-vote operations to educate voters about how right-to-work laws undermine worker power and wages. The ballot defeats deal a significant setback to the National Right to Work Committee, which had been founded just three years earlier in 1955 by Fred Hartley and corporate interests with the explicit goal of passing right-to-work laws in all 50 states.

The 1958 victories demonstrate that right-to-work expansion can be stopped through political organizing and voter mobilization, establishing a defensive model that labor unions would attempt to replicate in subsequent decades. However, the victories also represent a high-water mark for labor’s defensive capabilities. As union membership declines from 35 percent in 1954 to 10 percent by 2024, labor’s capacity to mount similarly effective resistance campaigns diminishes. The systematic corporate investment in anti-union infrastructure through the National Right to Work Committee, ALEC (founded 1973), and Powell Memo-inspired think tanks gradually shifts the political landscape. By 2012, right-to-work proponents successfully pass legislation in former union strongholds like Indiana and Michigan that had rejected such laws in earlier eras, demonstrating how sustained corporate investment in political infrastructure over decades eventually overcomes even strong initial democratic resistance.