On Feb­ru­ary 2nd, the Repub­li­can-dom­i­nat­ed Gen­er­al Assem­bly passed the two-ses­sion thresh­old need­ed to put the open shop before the Commonwealth’s vot­ers in Novem­ber. You might be ask­ing your­self, ​“Wait. I thought that Vir­ginia was already an open-shop state?” Your incli­na­tions would be cor­rect: leg­is­la­tion bar­ring union mem­ber­ship as a con­di­tion of employ­ment was signed into law by Gov. William Tuck (a lat­er adher­ent to Mas­sive Resis­tance in response to Brown v. Board of Edu­ca­tionas a mem­ber of Con­gress) in 1947. As a result, Sec­tion 40.1−58 of the Code of Vir­ginia reads:

It is here­by declared to be the pub­lic pol­i­cy of Vir­ginia that the right of per­sons to work shall not be denied or abridged on account of mem­ber­ship or non­mem­ber­ship in any labor union or labor organization.

So why do this? The easy answer is that Vir­ginia Repub­li­cans are fear­ful that, should the open shop meet a legal chal­lenge in state court, Demo­c­ra­t­ic Attor­ney Gen­er­al Mark Her­ring would not seek to defend it. The spon­sor of the bill and defeat­ed 2013 nom­i­nee for Attor­ney Gen­er­al, State Sen. Mark Oben­shain (R‑Harrisonburg), stat­ed as much in the delib­er­a­tions on the bill. In addi­tion, should the Assem­bly find itself in pro-labor hands in the future, they could over­turn the open shop with a sim­ple major­i­ty vote. Nev­er mind that the extreme amounts of ger­ry­man­der­ing in the Assem­bly (par­tic­u­lar­ly in the House of Del­e­gates) makes a uni­fied Demo­c­ra­t­ic state gov­ern­ment unlike­ly for decades to come.

The vote this Novem­ber will be the first pop­u­lar ref­er­en­dum on the open shop since 54 per­cent of Okla­homa vot­ers approved State Ques­tion 695 on Sep­tem­ber 25, 2001. In this, an oppor­tu­ni­ty presents itself to the labor move­ment in this coun­try, and it is one that labor unions must take.

In the fif­teen years since the Okla­homa ref­er­en­dum, every open-shop law has been passed through state leg­is­la­tures. This, of course, advan­tages cor­po­ra­tions and anti-work­er con­ser­v­a­tives as they can flood state capi­tols with their dona­tions and their lob­by­ists at a rel­a­tive dis­tance from pub­lic scruti­ny. Com­bined with the ger­ry­man­der­ing described above which ensures that an anti-work­er vote will not result in the loss of an elec­tion, the deck is often stacked far too high for labor advo­cates to over­come. The only hope for those who live in the thir­ty states with a Repub­li­can leg­is­la­ture is the pres­ence of a pro-labor gov­er­nor and leg­isla­tive pro­ce­dures that require a high­er thresh­old than a sim­ple major­i­ty to over­ride a veto.

West Vir­ginia work­ers just found out what hap­pens when you have the for­mer, but not the lat­ter.

There are demo­graph­ic rea­sons to feel good about this cam­paign: 18 – 34-year olds are the gen­er­a­tion most sup­port­ive of labor unions, and Black work­ers have both been more sup­port­ive and more eager join­ers of labor unions than their white coun­ter­parts. Vir­ginia has been a prime des­ti­na­tion for young peo­ple over the last cou­ple of decades due to the eco­nom­ic boom occur­ring in North­ern Vir­ginia, and the state has always had a large num­ber of Black residents.

But the cam­paign against the open shop this fall can­not rely on demo­graph­ics to save it. Giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty that labor unions have with this ref­er­en­dum, the goal should not sim­ply be to win: it should be a realign­ment of the con­ver­sa­tion sur­round­ing the role in labor unions in Virginia’s — and America’s — polit­i­cal economy.

There have been many issues stem­ming from the pre­cip­i­tous decline in union den­si­ty in this coun­try. The stag­na­tion of work­ing people’s wages, widen­ing inequal­i­ty, and a sense of alien­ation and dis­il­lu­sion­ment amongst the work­ing class can all be tied back to the decline of orga­nized labor in the Unit­ed States.

But there’s anoth­er thing that declin­ing union mem­ber­ship has pro­duced, and it is, per­haps, the great­est vic­to­ry of all for cap­i­tal­ism: the sense that, rather than being a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of America’s work­ing class, unions are no dif­fer­ent from any oth­er inter­est group. For­mer Ver­mont Gov. Howard Dean sought to mobi­lize this sen­ti­ment recent­ly in sup­port of Hillary Clinton’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paign when he stat­ed that “[Democ­rats] don’t go after” polit­i­cal dona­tions from labor unions because ​“labor unions are Super-PACs that Democ­rats like”.

(It should be not­ed, of course, that the only union that has spent any sig­nif­i­cant mon­ey on Bernie Sanders’s behalf is Nation­al Nurs­es Unit­ed. It appears that only Hillary Clin­ton will pro­tect us from Big Nurs­ing and the Care­giv­er-Indus­tri­al Complex.)

Part of this has been on the labor move­ment: too much mon­ey, time, and ener­gy has been devot­ed to elect­ing Democ­rats at all costs to fed­er­al office, even when they are absolute­ly ter­ri­ble. But most of it has been a con­cert­ed effort by neolib­er­als in both par­ties to erode unions’ once for­mi­da­ble approval rat­ings by asso­ci­at­ing them with the most unsa­vory parts of the leg­isla­tive process. How unsa­vory? In 2013, Gallup polled Amer­i­cans on the hon­esty of sev­er­al pro­fes­sions. Those who engage in lob­by­ing, a key part of the leg­isla­tive and pol­i­cy­mak­ing work that any inter­est group engages in, were at the bot­tom with a six per­cent approval rat­ing. By com­par­i­son, an August 2015 Gallup poll saw 58 per­cent of Amer­i­cans approv­ing of labor unions, with 37 per­cent believ­ing that they should have more influ­ence.

By mak­ing labor unions a crea­ture of pol­i­tics, work­ing-class Amer­i­cans begin to process the infor­ma­tion that they receive about unions the same way that they receive oth­er forms of polit­i­cal infor­ma­tion: in a par­ti­san man­ner. In his 2013 book The Par­ti­san Sort, Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor Matthew Lev­en­dusky states that:

[W]hen a respon­dent moves from unsort­ed to sort­ed, he is much more like­ly to move his ide­o­log­i­cal beliefs into align­ment with his par­ti­san­ship than the reverse, strong­ly sug­gest­ing that par­ty is the key causal variable.

There­fore, when work­ing-class Repub­li­cans think about labor unions, they are less like­ly to con­sid­er the fact that union mem­bers make 21 per­cent more than non-union mem­bers or that 29 per­cent more civil­ian work­ers have access to retire­ment plans if they are a mem­ber of a labor union. No, they are more like­ly to think about Democ­rats receiv­ing 89 per­cent of the dona­tions giv­en out by unions in 2014. The fact that the last two Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dents have sup­port­ed trade deals that act­ed as accel­er­ants on the con­tin­ued dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion of Amer­i­ca cer­tain­ly does not help mat­ters at all.

But the labor move­ment has been giv­en a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty in 2016, and it is one that should not be passed up: the oppor­tu­ni­ty to engage in the largest labor edu­ca­tion pro­gram that this coun­try has ever seen.

Over the next eight-and-a-half months, unions should be run­ning ads that focus on the specifics that so many Amer­i­can labor ads skirt around.

We can tell peo­ple that it is ille­gal for union dues to go towards polit­i­cal action at the fed­er­al lev­el. While dues mon­ey can go towards polit­i­cal spend­ing at the local and state lev­els, their dues most­ly pay for rep­re­sen­ta­tion, access to the indus­try-spe­cif­ic research need­ed to make nego­ti­a­tions more fruit­ful, and strike funds to sup­port work­ers when their meet­ing their demands requires direct action. We can tell peo­ple about the union dif­fer­ence in wages, ben­e­fits, and retirement. But even more impor­tant than that, we can talk about the ways that labor unions ben­e­fit the com­mu­ni­ties in which they exist. Not just through increased spend­ing in local busi­ness­es, but also through pro­grams that ben­e­fit a community’s most vul­ner­a­ble.

That last point is impor­tant, because it is how we will begin to devel­op the cul­ture of union­ism that we so des­per­ate­ly need in the South. It is impor­tant to ensure that the pos­i­tive feel­ing that today’s youth have towards labor unions does not turn into anti-labor sen­ti­ment through a life­time of one-way con­ver­sa­tion dom­i­nat­ed by cap­i­tal­ists and their PR lap dogs like Rick Berman.

But for this to be suc­cess­ful, all hands must be on deck. Vir­ginia is one of a cou­ple of states where such a mea­sure could be defeat­ed at the bal­lot box (the oth­er, for my mon­ey any­ways, being Ken­tucky), and it must be. Defeat­ing this ref­er­en­dum must become the labor movement’s num­ber one pri­or­i­ty in 2016, even more so than the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. In the piece I wrote about labor’s engage­ment in par­ty pol­i­tics, I stated:

If the labor move­ment must invest in pol­i­tics, it would be wis­est to do so at the community/​local/​state lev­el. It is there, our ​‘lab­o­ra­to­ries of pub­lic pol­i­cy’, where the labor move­ment can have the most pos­i­tive impact on the lives of work­ing people.

There is no time like the present for the labor move­ment to take this advice to heart.