West Virginia in 2018 was already a right-to-work state, where workers have no right to collective bargaining, where union membership is voluntary, and where the entire apparatus of the state is aimed at preventing exactly what wound up happening: an explosion of worker power. To Peters and other raise-denied workers listening to the conservative legislators testifying in hearings about controlling what they could and could not do with their own paycheck, this piece of legislation was a pure, unmitigated insult to their intelligence.

The final two issues of the strike were financial: the rising cost of health insurance coupled with eight years with no raise. The proposals for their health care went beyond merely raising the employees’ share of the cost. The health insurance plan changes for 2018 also included a provision called Go 365, a phone app that required workers to wear devices like a Fitbit to transmit their personal data to offset some of the proposed copay increases. “It was a complete, total invasion of our privacy,” Peters pointed out. In addition, the health insurance would have been using a new calculation that based the charges on total family income, not the individual employee’s. “By adding my husband, I was facing a two-hundred-dollar-a-month increase,” Peters says. “So when the governor offered a one percent pay raise in January, people had had enough.”