Labor Day is a good day to say something out loud that Montana has already decided, three separate times, in the last five years.

In 2021, in 2023, and again in 2025, a bill came to the Montana Legislature that would have made it illegal for an employer and a union to sign a contract requiring the workers covered by that contract to pay for their own representation. Twenty-seven states have a law like that on the books. Montana does not. Each time the question came up, Montana workers filled the Capitol, and each time the bill failed.

In 2021, House Bill 251 died on the House floor, with twenty-nine Republicans voting against it. In 2023, House Bill 448 went down in the House Business and Labor Committee by a vote of twelve to seven, and an attempt to pull it out of committee and onto the floor failed too. In 2025, Senate Bill 376 failed in committee seven to five on March 1, and a later attempt to bring it to the Senate floor failed eighteen to thirty-two.

Three legislatures. Three defeats. Republican votes in every one of them.

That is the part worth sitting with. Montana is a state where Republicans hold the majority and the governor’s office, and it is still the place where this idea keeps running out of road. Something other than party is doing that work.

What a union actually is

A union is a group of people who negotiate together. That is the whole of it.

One person asking for a raise is having a conversation. Forty people asking together are having a negotiation, and the agreement they reach is a contract. A contract has terms on both sides. The employer gets a trained workforce, a known cost structure, and a process for handling a grievance without a lawsuit. The workers get a wage they can plan a life around, a schedule, and safety rules that send them home at the end of a shift.

Right-to-work laws step into the middle of that. They tell a private employer and a private union what they are forbidden to agree to, even when both sides want the agreement. I have run a small business since 2001, and I have signed a lot of contracts. The idea that the state should reach in and void a term two willing parties negotiated in good faith has always struck me as backwards, whoever is doing the reaching.

That is the argument I hear from union members and from business owners in the Heights, and they arrive at it from opposite directions. Montanans do not care much for being told what they may and may not agree to.

This is not a museum piece

Montana’s labor history is real and it is bloody. Frank Little was dragged out of a Butte boarding house and killed in 1917. Miners were shot on Anaconda Road in 1920. Those are not stories about someone else’s state.

But the reason this matters in the Heights in 2026 is that the people it covers are the people at these doors right now. The rail crews. The linemen and operators. The electricians, plumbers, and pipefitters. The refinery workers. The teachers and paraprofessionals in our schools. The nurses and the aides. The public employees who plow the streets, treat the water, and answer the phone at the county.

These are not abstractions in this district. They are the household two doors down.

What I will do in Helena

I will vote against right-to-work every time it comes up, and I expect it to come up again in 2027. The same goes for the bills that arrive alongside it, the ones written to make it harder for a union to collect dues its own members voted to pay.

Beyond holding that line:

Protect the Montana Public Employees Collective Bargaining Act. Public workers have bargained in this state since 1973. That should stay true.

Keep prevailing wage strong. Montana’s Little Davis-Bacon law sets a standard wage on public works contracts of twenty-five thousand dollars or more, and requires that at least half the crew be Montana residents. Public money should build Montana careers. I will defend both the wage standard and the residency preference.

Restore the option of project labor agreements. A public owner should be able to choose one on a large or complicated project, where a single agreement covering every trade means a predictable timeline, a trained crew, and no work stoppage. This is a decision the people building the thing should get to make.

Raise direct care wages with a pass-through. Home care and long-term care workers are leaving the field for jobs that ask far less of them. When the Legislature funds a rate increase, the raise should be required to reach the paycheck.

One wage floor for everyone. All work deserves a livable wage, with no separate lower tier for any group of workers. Montana can phase out subminimum wage certificates within our own borders, and I will push for it.

Why I am asking

I am proud to carry the endorsements of the Montana AFL-CIO and the Montana Federation of Public Employees in this race. Those did not come with a script attached. They came from conversations about what happens to a family in the Heights when a contract is weakened, and about who is in the room in Helena when that vote is called.

Three times in five years, Montanans have shown up and held this ground. I am asking to be one of the votes that keeps holding it.

Good work, fairly paid, close to home. That is worth a Labor Day, and it is worth a legislature.

If this is the kind of representation you want in Helena, you can be part of it at smithformontana.com/donate.