After a string of vic­to­ries across the coun­try in recent years — includ­ing this summer’s Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court rul­ing — the anti-union ​“right-to-work” move­ment has met its match in Missouri.

In Tuesday’s pri­ma­ry elec­tion, Mis­souri vot­ers over­whelm­ing­ly reject­ed Propo­si­tion A, a bal­lot mea­sure that would have made the state the 28th in the nation to adopt a ​“right-to-work” (RTW) law. Designed to bank­rupt orga­nized labor, the decep­tive­ly named leg­is­la­tion would have pro­hib­it­ed pri­vate sec­tor unions from col­lect­ing fair share fees from work­ers they are legal­ly required to represent.

With the defeat of Prop A in Mis­souri, the U.S. labor move­ment has passed its first major test since the Janus deci­sion in June, in which the Supreme Court’s con­ser­v­a­tive major­i­ty essen­tial­ly imposed ​“right-to-work” on the nation’s entire pub­lic sector.

“The tim­ing of this is essen­tial. I think every­one wants to write the labor movement’s obit­u­ary,” AFL-CIO Sec­re­tary-Trea­sur­er Liz Shuler recent­ly said. ​“It’s going to ener­gize and acti­vate us and show that we fight back.”

“It’s going to be the shot heard round the world,” AFL-CIO Pres­i­dent Richard Trum­ka said last month, antic­i­pat­ing Prop A would lose. ​“It’ll make waves in Wis­con­sin and Penn­syl­va­nia and Ohio and Wash­ing­ton D.C. And it will pro­vide a pow­er­ful rebuke of the Supreme Court’s dis­grace­ful rul­ing in Janus.”

Since 2012, more states have passed RTW leg­is­la­tion than at any time since the 1950s. Even tra­di­tion­al union strong­holds like Michi­gan and Wis­con­sin have gone ​“right-to-work.” Mean­while, House Repub­li­cans have intro­duced a nation­al RTW bill, which Pres­i­dent Trump has promised to sign.

In states with ​“right-to-work” laws, medi­an house­hold incomes are $8,174 less than in non-RTW states, peo­ple under 65 are 46 per­cent more like­ly to be unin­sured, infant mor­tal­i­ty rates are 12 per­cent high­er and work­place deaths occur 49 per­cent more often.

Missouri’s RTW leg­is­la­tion was ini­tial­ly signed into law last Feb­ru­ary by the state’s dis­graced, now-for­mer gov­er­nor, Eric Gre­it­ens. A Repub­li­can backed by the Koch broth­ers and var­i­ous ​“dark mon­ey” groups, Gre­it­ens served only 16 months as gov­er­nor before resign­ing ear­li­er this year amid a series of scan­dals and crim­i­nal alle­ga­tions.

Gre­it­ens’ RTW law was sup­posed to take effect last August, but a coali­tion of labor groups led by the Mis­souri AFL-CIO gath­ered 310,567 hand-writ­ten peti­tion sig­na­tures to block its imple­men­ta­tion and force a statewide ref­er­en­dum on the leg­is­la­tion — Prop A.

Prop A was orig­i­nal­ly sched­uled for this November’s gen­er­al elec­tion, but this spring, the state’s Repub­li­can law­mak­ers moved it to the pri­ma­ry, wor­ried that a high union turnout in Novem­ber would be a boon to Democ­rats in hot­ly con­test­ed races. Described by Mis­souri AFL-CIO Pres­i­dent Mike Louis as a ​“devi­ous ploy,” the change marked the first time a ref­er­en­dum in the state has been moved to a pri­ma­ry election.

To defeat Prop A, union mem­bers and allies waged an aggres­sive get-out-the-vote cam­paign across the state, reach­ing some 500,000 vot­ers through door-to-door can­vass­ing and phone bank­ing. They got help from actor and Mis­souri native John Good­man, who nar­rat­ed a radio ad declar­ing that RTW ​“will not give you the right to work. Instead, it gives big busi­ness and out-of-state cor­po­ra­tions the right to pay you less than they do now.”

All told, orga­nized labor raised $15 mil­lion for the cam­paign to stop RTW in Mis­souri, out­spend­ing pro-RTW groups near­ly 5 to 1.

This is not the first time Mis­souri vot­ers have reject­ed RTW. In 1978, a sim­i­lar state bal­lot ini­tia­tive was defeat­ed by a 60 to 40 mar­gin, despite ear­ly polling sug­gest­ing an easy vic­to­ry for ​“right-to-work” forces. That vic­to­ry, how­ev­er, was fol­lowed by a pre­cip­i­tous decline in the pow­er of orga­nized labor nation­wide from the 1980s to today. Whether or not Tuesday’s defeat of Prop A sig­nals a larg­er shift in labor’s for­tunes remains to be seen.

If noth­ing else, Mis­souri vot­ers’ rejec­tion of RTW shows that the eulo­gies for orga­nized labor post-Janus are pre­ma­ture. As Trum­ka says, ​“We’ve tak­en their best shot, and we’re still standing.”