At the risk of plagiarism I am going to borrow heavily from a recent Commonweal editorial too good to let get by. Commonweal is a lay Catholic New York bi-monthly in print since 1924 which has distinguished itself by its reliable social awareness. This editorial on the Wisconsin debacle should show why.
It seems our social amnesia about the common good and how we got where we are is responsible for the preposterous notion that we no longer need labor unions. It is true that we have slipped from 33 percent of the U.S. workforce being unionized to less than 12, with more than half the union members working public employment jobs, such as teachers. That might be explained by the passage of a lot of time since unions forced the ending of child labor and dangerous working conditions, and secured reasonable benefits, to name a few of their accomplishments.
I concede that teachers have tenure policies that need some attention. So do they. If only 17 out of 100,000 cases resulted in the dismissal of an incompetent teacher, there is evidence. The teachers have agreed to put this on the table. They have also agreed to take less since Wisconsin, like most states, has major economic problems in this, the Great Recession. But in order to discuss such issues there has to be a table. In union parlance, it is called collective bargaining. It is a right held by working people. It is solidly backed by the church since 1891. Gov. Scott Walker, however, wants to up the ante by a quantum leap or two: He wants to end most of workers’ collective bargaining rights.
Today’s midgets are standing on the shoulders of the giants who decades ago won gains for labor that benefit the whole country. Bargaining with employers with the help of unions is as American as cherry pie. Take away the right — and it is recognized by law as a right — and you have a swift return to sweat shops and unsafe mines and other horrors apparently unknown to a complacent America.
By remarkable coincidence, Gov. Walker is acting to strip only some of his public employees of their right to collectively bargain. It seems the teachers voted against him, so they take it on the chin. But the firefighter and police unions who supported him at the polls are visibly exempt from being deprived of negotiating in his proposed legislation.
Other governors in other statehouses of Walker’s ilk are counting on taxpayers blaming budget shortfalls on these public employees, who are already on record as willing to take cutbacks. Some states can document that opportunistic gubernatorial candidates promised to boost salaries in good times, leaving it to their successors to figure out how to deliver. Late Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo is a local instance of promising city workers super-generous packages that present major problems now. “But to suggest, as Walker and a number of other . . . governors have, that the current fiscal problems in the states have been caused by the unions is scapegoating.”
Wisconsin workers can see what’s coming. Tens of thousands of them occupied the Capitol in Madison for weeks in protest of the coming end of worker rights, the real objective of governors in a mean, recessionary time where the temptation is to divide and conquer working people instead of taxing the wondrously ignored fabulous incomes of the wealthy. How is it that ordinary people do not see that states are favoring the only people climbing out of recession brought on by the wealthy Wall Street buccaneers? One could surmise that such short-term thinkers believe they will become wealthy if they protect the wealthy, feathering their own future nests. These folks I’d like to sell some real estate just south of Cape May Point.
Convince enough gullible people that they do not need collective bargaining because they do not belong to a union and you let the camel’s nose into the tent. Deceive enough voters into protecting the wealthy who will profit immediately by any injury to the unions their mischief brought into being and you will witness even more middle-class decline. Fool enough cash-strapped citizens into holding that another’s loss is their gain and you have what Walker and his fat-cat cronies want: the end of the only reliable buttress against employer abuse of workers, for collective bargaining is the essence of unionism.
Meanwhile, let’s deregulate so we can get Big Government off the backs of the billionaires.
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