Eleanor Roosevelt's Fight for Labor Rights Lives On

Proponents of Proposition 32 hail it as “campaign finance reform.” Yet it places no meaningful restrictions on corporate contributions to candidates, campaigns, or Super PACs. Members of the 1 percent or the 10 percent don’t use paycheck deductions to contribute to politics. They use profits, interest, dividends, salaries, and bonuses. Professor John Logan, director of labor and employment relations at San Francisco State University, reports that the backers of Prop 32 are also some of the same wealthy individuals who helped bring us the Citizens United Supreme Court decision leading to the most expensive election year on record.

This is also a “one-two punch.” In 1958, Eleanor Roosevelt led a national effort opposing right-to-work laws in six states, including California, where the law was defeated. Most recently, the fight has escalated in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana and has now returned to California. If Prop 32 passes this year, workers will have diminished political power and next year we can expect to see these other anti-labor propositions further weakening private sector unions. Workers’ ability to fight back in California will be stopped in its tracks by Prop 32.

Mrs. Roosevelt saw unions as fundamental to the democratic process. She thrived on educating union members and rallying them to register people to vote, participate in conventions and campaigns, and get people to the polls on Election Day. She warned that when fear and prejudice are running high, “We may wake up to find that in trying to remedy certain wrongs, we have shorn ourselves of certain very precious freedoms.” In 1958, Mrs. Roosevelt called the right-to-work effort a “predatory and misleading campaign,” an equally apt description of Proposition 32 today.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, when asked where human rights begin, she answered, “In small places close to home … unless they have meaning there they will have little meaning any where.” Proposition 32 is very close to home for Californians, and if it passes here it could come to your neighborhood soon.

Editor's Note: Author Brigid O’Farrell is an independent scholar in Moss Beach, California, and member of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981, whose most recent book is She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker, now available in paperback.

This article was reprinted with permission of Next New Deal

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Eleanor Roosevelt's Fight for Labor Rights Lives On

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