On election night, Bob King knew what lay ahead.
Last month's rejection of Proposal 2 assured organized labor's defeat this week in Michigan's lopsided right-to-work battle, culminating a series of miscalculations by the United Auto Workers president and others.
Barely a month after voters killed a proposed collective bargaining amendment to the state constitution, the right-to-work loss weakens his credibility with the union's major employers, imperils his membership and potentially slows the union's dues flow, say labor analysts and ranking auto industry execs familiar with the situation.
"I'd rather try and fail than not try at all," King said in an interview Thursday from Geneva, Switzerland, where he is attending a meeting of a global union federation. "This was a hard blow. Did we make some mistakes on Prop 2? Yes, we did. We did it because of broader concerns for the labor movement" — legislation barring dues collection from public school teachers being one example that particularly rankled.
Read Article