In the past year, the American labor movement was dominated by two things. First, the Janus decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled the public sector was essentially “right to work ” — meaning, workers covered by union contracts no longer had to pay the costs of their representation. And second, the “Red for Ed” movement, the wave of teacher strikes, mostly in conservative states with few union protections.

The teachers’ uprisings, from West Virginia onward across the country, garnered weeks of front-page news and are no doubt helping to fuel the strikes already happening or pending this fall: Thousands of Washington State teachers are walking the picket lines, and Seattle and Los Angeles teachers voted to authorize their own potential strikes.

But the underlying story of 2018 is that the growing labor militancy making headlines has its roots in slow, grinding efforts made in recent years by workers constantly denigrated by both major political parties and even written off by much of organized labor itself. Workers are putting in the effort over weeks, months and years to build new unions and to strengthen and reclaim moribund ones, and even to begin to chip away at the wall of new “right to work” laws passed since 2012. Their work has meant a slight uptick in union membership numbers, and a larger one in public approval for unions — suggesting that the more Americans see unions fight, and strike, for what they believe in, the more we want to join them.

In Missouri, a statewide movement put a referendum on a state right-to-work law on the Primary Day ballot. Not only did voters overwhelmingly overturn the law, but the referendum drew more votes than were cast in the party primaries. Missouri’s unions and labor organizations such as Jobs With Justice led the fight, but in a state where only about 9 percent of the work force is represented by a union, labor had to mobilize plenty of nonunion workers to reject the right to work law. The coalition relied heavily on black and Latino voters, almost certainly benefiting from organizing efforts in the wake of the 2014 Ferguson uprising.