LABOR HAS BEEN showing up in ballot question debates for years, but the last decade has seen unions truly out in force behind some of the buzziest initiatives. So when and why does organized labor decide manpower, mobilization, and money should funnel away from Beacon Hill and toward direct democracy?

This week on The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jennifer Smith looks at the past and present of unions and ballot measures with Nick Juravich, associate professor of history and labor studies and associate director of the Labor Resource Center at UMass Boston; and Chrissy Lynch, head of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO.

While the last few years have seen millions pour toward pro-unionizing efforts, in the long run “labor is never really going to outspend its opponents, but it can be present on the ground,” Juravich said.

Initiatives from the political right in the 1970s and early 1980s carved away at union power, Juravich said, and the 1980 ballot measure Proposition 2½ that capped how much municipal property taxes could be raised was “devastating for the public sector.”

For the Massachusetts Teachers Association — the force behind last cycle’s ballot measure eliminating MCAS as a graduation requirement — Juravich said the shift toward getting aggressively involved in ballot measures began with the 2016 fight over raising the charter school cap. After $46.6 million spent in support and $15.4 million spent in opposition, voters rejected the question with about 60 percent of the vote.

Educators took the message to their immediate communities, and a postmortem memo for the pro-charter side found voters trusted teachers, Chalkbeat reported. The union came away with “a ballot muscle,” Juravich said.

He said unions that lean toward the private sector, like health care workers, can have a tougher time making their case if they represent fields without as much daily contact with voters as educators.

Lynch said the AFL-CIO weighs each question by how it affects members on and off the job with “a limited amount of resources” to spend. Lately, she said, its ballot work has been “more us reacting to things.”

That includes Question 3, which would replace party primaries with a single primary open to all candidates, with the top two advancing to the general election. Lynch said her first reaction was, “I don’t think we’re gonna get involved in this.”

After talks with member unions and a look at other states, the federation came to oppose it, describing the measure as “moving to a system where whoever comes in with the most personal money from the jump are gonna be the two most viable candidates.”

CommonWealth Beacon, which has a guide on all nine current measures, will be hosting a debate on the all-party primaries question on Tuesday, October 13.

Rideshare drivers won the right to unionize at the ballot in 2024, and employees of the Committee for Public Counsel Services, the state’s public defender agency, are asking for the same this year with Question 2.

Lynch called the back-to-back measures “a symptom of the fact that people want a union in their life.”

The direct-to-voters path, rather than waiting for lawmakers to expand or clarify the law is “not very common,” Juravich said, but he expects that to change. “We are in a moment of flux in labor law in this country,” he said. “That’s national, and that’s local.”

Juravich on labor’s ballot history begins at 1:30. Lynch on how the AFL-CIO picks its fights begins at 21:00.