The Big Picture
Every September, politicians celebrate the workers who built America’s middle class. Michigan is attempting something more ambitious: rebuilding some of the institutions that helped workers build it.
For decades, that project appeared to be moving in the opposite direction but Michigan is leading the charge to change that momentum.
Michigan was once nearly synonymous with American organized labor. The sit-down strikes in Flint helped build the United Auto Workers. Detroit’s automakers helped turn collective bargaining into a vehicle for middle-class wages and benefits. At the end of the 1980s, more than one in four Michigan workers belonged to a union.
Then came decades of decline. By 2012, Michigan’s union membership rate had fallen to 16.6%. That same year, Republicans delivered another blow: making the birthplace of the modern American labor movement a right-to-work state.
Eleven years later, Democrats got the chance to reverse it.
After winning full control of state government for the first time in roughly four decades, Democrats and Governor Gretchen Whitmer repealed right-to-work. The change took effect in February 2024, making Michigan the first state in nearly six decades to repeal such a law. It was an extraordinary reversal of a conservative policy project that, for decades, had moved almost exclusively in one direction – But reversing a law is easier than reversing its effects.
Two years into Michigan’s experiment, union membership has not surged as some had hoped and even remains near historic lows. That doesn’t necessarily mean repeal failed, but it does suggest something more important about what government can—and cannot—do to rebuild worker power.
How Michigan Lost the Union State
It’s important to establish at the outset that Right-to-work didn’t destroy Michigan’s unions.
Michigan’s union decline began long before Republicans enacted the law in 2012. In 1989, 26% of Michigan wage-and-salary workers belonged to a union. By 2004, it was 21.6%. By 2012, it was 16.6%. Right-to-work arrived in the middle of that decline.
The policy itself is also frequently misunderstood.
Under federal labor law, a union chosen to represent a workplace generally has an obligation to represent workers covered by the bargaining unit. Right-to-work laws prevent unions and employers from negotiating agreements requiring represented workers to financially support that representation.
Supporters call that worker choice: no employee should have to financially support a union he or she doesn’t want to support.
Unions call it a free-rider problem: workers can benefit from collectively negotiated wages, benefits and representation without contributing toward the organization paying to negotiate and enforce them.
Whatever terminology you prefer, research suggests the policy matters.
One study examining five states that adopted right-to-work laws between 2011 and 2017—including Michigan—estimated that unionization was about four percentage points lower five years after adoption, while wages were about 1% lower. The effects were particularly pronounced in industries that began with relatively high unionization.
All that to say that right-to-work didn’t create Michigan’s labor problem; however, there is evidence that it made an existing problem worse.
Turning the Ratchet Backward
For decades, right-to-work offered a case study in how conservatives used state government.
The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act allowed states to enact the laws. Many Southern and Western states did. Then another wave reached traditionally union-heavy parts of the Midwest. Indiana enacted right-to-work in 2012. Michigan followed. Wisconsin adopted it in 2015. West Virginia followed in 2016.
The political ratchet largely moved one way – but Michigan eventually demonstrated that it didn’t have to.
Democrats won control of both chambers of the Michigan Legislature in 2022, giving the party a governing trifecta. In March 2023, Whitmer signed legislation repealing right-to-work. The repeal took effect on February 13, 2024.
For private-sector workplaces, unions and employers could once again negotiate union-security provisions requiring workers represented by the union to financially support that representation. The change did not recreate the same system for public employees, where the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision prohibits compulsory agency fees.
The broader significance, however, went beyond the technical change. Michigan became the first state in 58 years to repeal right-to-work. That’s an important lesson for Democrats interested in state policy: policy regimes aren’t permanent – states can be laboratories for reversing policy experiments too!
But that leaves the harder question – did it work?
So, Did It Work?
The first year looked promising.
Michigan entered 2024 with its union membership rate at 12.8%—the lowest level recorded since comparable state data began in 1989. Then right-to-work repeal took effect. By the end of the year, Michigan had approximately 581,000 union members, up from 564,000. Union density climbed from 12.8% to 13.4%.
It would have made for a tidy story: Michigan repealed right-to-work. Union membership went up.
Then came 2025 where Michigan’s union membership fell back to approximately 566,000. Union density slipped to 13%. In other words, two years into the post-right-to-work experiment, Michigan has roughly as many union members as it did before repeal.
Those numbers require some caution. State-level union estimates come from relatively small survey samples, and federal statisticians warn against reading too much into small year-to-year changes. The 2025 figures are additionally based on only 11 months because October data weren’t collected during the federal government shutdown.
But inconvenient data shouldn’t simply be explained away. There is no evidence yet of the dramatic union revival that supporters might have hoped would follow repeal.
The more interesting question is whether we should have expected one.
What Government Can—and Can’t—Do
Repealing right-to-work doesn’t organize a single workplace.
It doesn’t convince workers at a nonunion factory that they should organize. It doesn’t win a representation election. It doesn’t force an employer to agree to a first contract. And it certainly doesn’t reverse decades of automation, deindustrialization, globalization and changes in the composition of the American workforce.
What repeal does is change the institutional environment in which unions operate.
A union that represents a bargaining unit must expend resources negotiating contracts, handling grievances and representing workers. Right-to-work allowed workers receiving those services to opt out of financially supporting the union.
Michigan has now removed that restriction for private-sector collective bargaining.
That can potentially give unions more reliable resources to service existing members and organize new ones. But there is an important distinction: strengthening the infrastructure of organized labor is not the same thing as expanding organized labor.
Michigan can make it easier for unions to build. Unions still have to build.
And because collective-bargaining agreements operate on multiyear cycles, the practical consequences of repeal won’t arrive everywhere simultaneously. Union-security provisions may have to be negotiated as contracts expire.
That makes Michigan’s experiment less like flipping a switch and more like resetting a machine that has been moving in the opposite direction for decades.
The real test isn’t simply whether Michigan’s union density moved from 12.8% to 13.4% and then 13%. It’s what happens next.
The Case Against
There is another reason not to judge Michigan solely by its union membership numbers. Opponents made a different prediction – they argued repeal would hurt Michigan’s economy.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned lawmakers in 2023 that right-to-work helped Michigan compete for economic-development projects and jobs. If businesses were choosing between otherwise similar sites, the Chamber argued, right-to-work could tilt investment toward Michigan.
The philosophical argument was equally straightforward: workers should decide for themselves whether a union provides enough value to deserve their financial support. Those aren’t totally frivolous objections.
If stronger unions produce higher labor costs, businesses deciding where to build their next factory may take those costs into account. Michigan isn’t competing only against Ohio or Illinois. It is competing for manufacturing investment against states across the South where unionization is much lower.
That gives Michigan’s experiment two potential measures of failure.
Repeal could fail because it doesn’t meaningfully strengthen organized labor
or
It could strengthen labor while making Michigan substantially less competitive for investment and jobs.
So far, neither conclusion is obvious. There hasn’t been a dramatic union resurgence. But there also isn’t compelling evidence that ending right-to-work has produced the economic calamity opponents warned about.
That leaves Michigan in a much more interesting place than either side’s talking points suggest.
The Michigan Test
The next several years should tell us much more. Ultimately, Michigan’s right-to-work repeal experiment should be judged by three tests.
Institutional strength - Do Michigan unions become financially and organizationally stronger as collective-bargaining agreements turn over and the repeal works its way through unionized workplaces?
Organizing strength - Do those stronger institutions translate their resources into organizing campaigns, election victories and first contracts that actually bring more workers into organized labor?
Worker outcomes - Does stronger collective bargaining translate into higher compensation, better benefits and greater economic security without imposing an economic cost large enough to outweigh those gains?
These tests matter because Michigan’s experiment speaks to something larger than right-to-work.
Democrats have spent much of the past decade searching for ways to rebuild their economic relationship with working-class voters. Much of that agenda asks government to do more for workers: subsidize child care, lower health-care costs, provide paid leave, forgive debt or send tax credits.
Those policies can materially improve people’s lives.
But Labor policy operates differently. Its underlying proposition is that government doesn’t have to negotiate every economic gain on workers’ behalf. It can instead change the rules governing the workplace and give workers more power to negotiate those gains themselves.
Michigan is testing how far that proposition can go.
Bottom Line
There is an appealing simplicity to Michigan’s right-to-work repeal.
Republicans passed a law designed to limit unions. Democrats took power and repealed it. Organized labor gets stronger. Reality is proving more complicated.
Michigan’s labor movement was declining long before right-to-work arrived. Repealing one law was never going to reverse decades of economic and institutional change overnight. But that doesn’t make the repeal meaningless.
Michigan has removed a policy that research suggests contributed to lower unionization and wages. It has demonstrated that the conservative state-policy ratchet can run backward. And it has given organized labor a more favorable set of rules under which to rebuild.
What it hasn’t done is rebuild labor for them. That may ultimately be the most useful lesson from Michigan’s experiment.
Government can change the rules of the game. But Labor has to prove it can win under them.