Idaho Legislature Overrides Veto to Impose Right-to-Work Law, Devastating Labor Movement

On January 31, 1985, the Republican-controlled Idaho Legislature overrides Democratic Governor John Evans’ veto to enact so-called “Right-to-Work” legislation, making Idaho the 21st state to prohibit union security agreements that require workers to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment. The law passes despite Idaho’s historic role as a “hotbed of radical organizing” where miners, loggers, and railroad workers had waged militant battles against corporate power since the 1890s, including the violent Coeur d’Alene miners’ strikes of 1892 and 1899 that led to the founding of the Western Federation of Miners.

Voters narrowly affirm the law by referendum on November 4, 1986, with 54% voting in favor. The legislation’s impact on Idaho’s labor movement proves devastating and immediate. In 1985, nearly 11% of private-sector workers were covered by union contracts, with union density particularly high in the state’s historic economic engines: 23% in manufacturing and 17% in construction, with approximately 28,000 total union members. Within three years, the Idaho Labor Department estimates that 5,000 construction workers leave Idaho in 1988 alone, as skilled tradespeople drive to non-Right-to-Work states Oregon and Washington where wages are often $5 per hour higher.

By 2013, while total employment surges from 289,000 to 617,000 jobs, union membership barely increases to 29,000, causing union density to plummet to approximately 4.7%—a collapse of nearly 60% in union representation rates. The wage suppression effects are stark and sustained: in the 28 years before Right-to-Work (1957-1985), Idaho per capita income grew 67% adjusted for inflation, but in the 28 years following (1985-2013), income growth slows dramatically to just 40%. Manufacturing employment does increase at nearly 4% annually between 1987 and 1996, compared to less than 1% before 1986, but the jobs created pay significantly lower wages without union protection.

The law represents a comprehensive victory for corporate interests, particularly in Idaho’s dominant extractive industries of mining, timber, and agriculture. University of Idaho historian Katherine Aiken notes the bitter irony: “Idaho has a leading role in United States labor history in the 1890s and throughout a big part of the 20th century,” with unions playing crucial roles in northern and central Idaho mines where hardrock miners organized in the 1890s to demand $3.50 daily wages. In that era, Idaho regularly elected Populist Party candidates advocating progressive income taxes, abolition of the Pinkerton union-busting system, and public ownership of banks and railroads.

The 1985 Right-to-Work law exemplifies how corporate interests captured Idaho’s legislative process to dismantle the state’s once-powerful labor movement, using free-market ideology to mask a systematic program of wage suppression. The legislation follows a national pattern coordinated by corporate lobbying groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which develops model Right-to-Work bills and coordinates their introduction in state legislatures. The Idaho case demonstrates how anti-labor legislation devastates working-class economic power in states with historic labor militancy, particularly in extractive industries where unions had previously won hard-fought gains through strikes and organizing drives that were brutally suppressed by private security forces and military intervention throughout the Gilded Age and early 20th century.