PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF REBELAT, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
It should come as a shock to no one that Governor Eric Greitens carved a notch on his mini-Trump belt by signing a law that makes it far easier for Missouri employers to discriminate against workers and whistleblowers.
After rising to power as an outsider who mercilessly bashed Republican legislators as corrupt career politicians (much like His Tweetness), the least Greitens could do was throw a bone to his adopted party by signing off on one of its dearest priorities: ending their decade of terror in which Missouri found itself clinging to one of the most liberal employment laws in the nation.
Whether as a result of former Governor Jay Nixon’s veto pen or their own shortcomings, the Republicans had for ages failed their corporate benefactors by not following the rest of America’s march to the right on so-called tort reform, a euphemism for curtailing average citizens’ right to obtain civil justice as plaintiffs or apply it as jurors.
So it came to pass that Missouri found itself unwittingly granting workers fairer anti-discrimination protections than 38 other states and the federal government. This could not stand, not on the heels of the grand right-to-work triumph, not in this Year of the Subdued Employee.
Give Greitens credit for some acting skill (or comic timing) for pretending to give weighty consideration to the pros and cons of Senate Bill 43. It was amazing to see, after all of his campaign rhetoric about vile “trial lawyers,” how many people still thought this guy was seriously undecided.
In fairness to the governor, it was the Republican-controlled legislature that botched the process beyond belief. Understand that lining up Missouri’s employment laws with other states’ was as inevitable as the right-to-work mission. With overwhelming majorities in both houses and a governor publicly committed to the issue, how hard was this going to be?
Just imagine being part of the Republican brain trust on this. Let’s see: How can we possibly screw this up? Well, for starters, let’s have the bill to promote discrimination sponsored by a guy (Senator Gary Romine, R-Farmington) whose rent-to-own company is facing a lawsuit for racial discrimination in which he is alleged to have done nothing in the face of a supervisor’s having (allegedly) dropped repeated N-bombs on an employee and having redlined a black community.
But that’s not enough. Let’s not even pretend to care what legislators on the other side of the aisle think—or offer them civility. Instead, let’s drive home our dominance by cutting off the microphone during the committee testimony of a respected African-American leader, NAACP state president Rod Chapel—just to hark back to those good ol’ Little Dixie days when men like Chapel didn’t have to be tolerated at all.
Now there’s a nice strategy.
So here’s what the Republicans won themselves: a black community (with plenty of white company) so understandably outraged by these actions that the words “Jim Crow” just flowed forth. This created an appearance of racism because, well, it was flat-out racist.
How brilliant. Instead of just doing what they felt they had to do—line up Missouri laws with other states’ to make it harder for employees of all protected classes to sue for discrimination—the Republicans appeared to create “Jim Crow laws” that went far beyond other states in taking Missouri back to the days of segregation.
For the record, it’s not quite accurate to label the changes in evidence standards as Jim Crow laws (noxious though they are). But it is accurate to label this a Jim Crow process, and Missouri government got what it richly deserved when the NAACP issued an unprecedented national travel advisory warning African-Americans about the danger of visiting the state.
For sure, there’s an awful litany of other reasons that the NAACP had justification in calling out Missouri. Black drivers are now 75 percent more likely than white drivers to be pulled over in this state (according to state statistics), and that disparity has skyrocketed over the past decade.
There are, of course, the tragedies of Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell (and others), and now Tory Sanders, a black man from Tennessee who made a wrong turn into Missouri, asked a cop for help, and wound up dead in his cell. There is the racial strife that tore up the University of Missouri. There’s plenty more.
But the massive hit to Missouri’s reputation from the NAACP action might have been avoided, had the Republican majority not conducted itself in such a disgusting fashion. And to what end? It’s not as if they needed to channel Bull Connor to get their vote margins.
Now, for those who want to push back on the NAACP travel ban by pointing out how unfair it is to single out Missouri without mentioning the 38 other states—and those who want to stand up for what’s left of the honor of our state—I’d like to call your attention to the most overlooked part of this story: the slanderous attacks on Missouri that no less a dignitary than our governor invoked to set the stage for this nonsense.
I speak of the American Tort Reform Association’s designation of St. Louis as the nation’s worst “judicial hellhole.” Greitens actually sank to citing this slur in his first State of the State address. ATRA is a pseudo–think tank formed in 1986 with heavy tobacco industry funding (with help from insurance and pharmaceutical giants) to try to overhaul civil liability laws. That’s quaint. ATRA is an original practitioner of fake news; the Center for Justice & Democracy at New York Law School described it as having “no methodology” and says “its sourcing is a joke,” as is the way the group arrives at its “judicial hellhole” labels.
The center had this to say about ATRA’s attack on St. Louis:
In earlier years, ATRA’s “hellhole” reports attacked the competence of jurors quite specifically, in addition to that of judges from these communities. “[Juries] in St. Louis tend to disfavor large corporations.” Seemingly after being stung by criticism that “minorities made up most of the populations in the judicial hellholes” identified by ATRA, the organization switched its focus exclusively to judges.
However, the 2016 report is a full-throttle attack on juries again, in fact identifying St. Louis as a new #1 “hellhole” based largely on three different verdicts against Johnson & Johnson, whose powder caused ovarian cancer. Of course, these are cases where J&J’s teams of corporate defense lawyers had full opportunity to refute the scientific evidence against it and present their case. They repeatedly lost. ATRA’s only explanation is to malign and belittle the jurors’ integrity and intelligence, falsely alleging they were all “preconditioned” and “tricked”—something that should insult all Americans
At least someone stood up for St. Louis. Somehow I can’t find one instance of any local or state official publicly pushing back against ATRA for maligning our city and state. But can you imagine the reaction in Missouri had the NAACP called the state a hellhole?
Sadly, the ATRA strategy has worked, as has overheated rhetoric. Here’s how the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry framed the employment discrimination issue in January, by way of general counsel Brian Bunten: “A decade of court decisions have eroded our state’s laws and made Missouri courts a dangerous place for employers. Often, rather than go through the expense of building a case against a biased court system, employers will settle out of court. That’s not justice. That’s extortion.”
Missouri is a dangerous place for employers? Extortion? Forbes magazine ranked Missouri as having the 12th-best regulatory climate in the nation in its 2016 “Best States for Business” rankings. (It scored the state 25th overall). This is the kind of statistic that the Chamber routinely touts to persuade businesses to move here.
Maybe the Chamber will now develop a “No Longer Dangerous: We Can Discriminate in Peace Again” campaign to market the state. That’s about as likely as its launching an initiative to make sensitivity to discrimination a higher priority.
I’d like to think that most Missouri companies are better than this. It’s understandable that they want a fair and level playing field when it comes to employment law, but it sure doesn’t appear that that’s all they got here—and I’m an employer.
With right to work and freedom to discriminate behind them, it will be interesting to see what new anti-employee initiatives lie ahead for the state legislature. While we wait, here’s a chilling footnote: Romine, the senator at the eye of the racial storm, is one of the least conservative Republican legislators. He was one of the only members of the GOP caucus to vote against right to work, and he was in the tiny minority of senators confronting Greitens about his shameful dark-money practices. Greitens has sent his minions to protest at Romine’s office. Consumer advocates have praised him as one of the few Republicans willing to stand up to utility giants.
This guy is as good as it gets?
It's going to be a long three more years for Missouri.
SLM publisher Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
