From July 27th to 31st, two of our newly-elected Executive Board Members—Agnes Braga, a Speech-Language Pathology Assistant at LAUSD and Toi Jackson, a Special Education Assistant at LAUSD—volunteered to join a boots-on-the-ground fight in the deep-red state of Missouri to beat back Proposition A. The ballot measure—had it passed—would have made Missouri a right-to-work state. But it didn’t pass. In fact, it was crushed on Tuesday (67.3 percent of voters in opposition versus 32.7 in support) due in large part to the state-wide effort Toi and Agnes were part of to educate voters on right-to-work and its negative impact on worker rights, jobs and the economy. Read our interview with them about their experience out.

When Jan Williams first started driving school buses back in 1998, she worked for a non-unionized contractor earning a dismal $7 an hour. That all changed when she moved on to work as a driver for Los Angeles Unified School District. There, she earned more than twice that. The difference? She had a union behind her job at LAUSD. This is her story.