The Wall Street Journal very predictably supports the public sector union-busting efforts of the Wisconsin Republican Party and their novice governor. To them, all these protestors are just like the unwashed Greeks and Frenchies who take to the streets whenever their betters try to turn the economic screws on them. One point they make is that Franklin Roosevelt opposed public service unions.
Salon has an interesting interview with Georgetown professor Joseph McCartin about the history and development of unionized government workers in the 1950’s. He argues that FDR would have changed his mind and supported collective bargaining for government workers because the practice came to be seen as good government in the post-war era. He’s probably right, but I don’t want to argue that point. The more interesting part of the interview is about why people initially supported public service unions and now are much less happy about them.
SALON: But what about the key difference between private sector and public sector unions? Private sector unions are bargaining for a share of a company’s profits. But in the public sector … the government is a nonprofit. You’re bargaining for a share of the taxpayer’s pocketbook?
McCARTY: It’s a significant difference and it is a difference that entails certain political sensitivities. It’s easier for the public to support a striking auto worker than it is a striking sanitation worker who is not picking up your trash. However, if you look at the rise of public sector unions throughout the ’60s and up through the mid ’70s, there was general public sympathy for them and that sympathy grew out of the fact that when you looked closely you could see that public sector workers were not paid as much as their counterparts in the private sector, and especially when you compared them to private sector union workers, they lagged behind.
SALON: That same sympathy doesn’t seem to be as widespread today. What changed?
McCARTY: A lot of this was really produced by the events of the last few years. There was a tremendous loss in the stock market that left a lot of pension funds looking underfunded, and that set off a lot of alarms in people. Now I’m not going to say that there aren’t some workers in some places that have gotten some pensions that aren’t really fully justifiable but that is different than saying that the whole principle of collective bargaining is wrong.
But an even more important factor is basically a 20- or 30-year period of failure in the private sector. What we are really looking at here is a private sector that for quite a long time now has not generated a lot of rising income for the great majority. It has not generated stable benefits for its workers, it has not generated increasing retirement security — in fact we’ve had income stagnation or decline, we’ve had rising indebtedness, we’ve had growing insecurity for retirement. The private sector has failed on a massive level. And the tenuous position that so many American workers find themselves in as a result of that now makes it suddenly appear that public sector workers are just living off the fatted calf. I think some of it has to do quite simply with the way in which so many nongovernment workers have been suffering, and legitimately so. You can go to those folks and say: Why are you paying for the pension of the guy down the street? You don’t have one!
SALON: That seems to be a real political liability for public sector unions.
McCARTY: It is a real liability, but it is liability that is not the result of union munificence, or that came from squeezing the taxpayers; it is a liability that basically flows from the fact that the private sector has done so poorly at creating a really broad growing thriving middle class in the past 20 years. And without a broad growing, thriving middle class, government workers are increasingly isolated and increasingly under threat and it is easy to play the dynamic this way, unfortunately for them.
So, prior to the Reagan Revolution, people in the private sector could tell that teachers, social workers, firefighters, police, and civil servants were getting screwed because they couldn’t collectively negotiate their contracts. But now it looks like they are getting a sweet deal at the taxpayer’s expense. To the degree that that is true, it isn’t because government workers are better off. It’s because everyone else is getting screwed. And why is that? The fact that the power of unions has waned under sustained Republican assault is one of the most important reasons. Obviously, increased global competition is another.
The Republicans are trying to destroy a major wing of the U.S. labor movement, and they’re likely to succeed.
Failure to pass EFCA was a big F’n deal. And I blame the system, not Obama, but its depressing to think we couldn’t get this passed with the majorities we had.
Does anyone know if Obama’s DOL and NLRB has been successful? Both of those agencies can do a lot of good for workers if they have the support of the president and the right people at the top. I’m just not informed on the subject so I’m going to reserve comment.
I will say this though: if I know a politician is in favor of EFCA and filibuster reform, I don’t need to ever hear another word from his/her mouth to know who’s side they are on. They have my vote.
thanks for reminding me about the failure on EFCA.
Stupid stupid stupid.
Yeah that sucks and it’s not Obama’s fault any more than it is the rest of the Dems. But this is what comes of legitimizing the republicans.
It’s worth reading from Chapter One of Karl Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto in this context. Obviously, his words are quite seductive, but they are also surprisingly applicable to the condition we finds ourselves in. From our far-flung foreign occupations, to our desire to expand Free Trade and expand exports, to the economic calamity and destruction of capital that we’ve experienced, to the pressure on unions, we are obviously coming to the end of a cycle. The last time this happened we answered it with unionization and it built a well-fed middle class. How long before we realize this?
And now there is hardly a proletariat left. And so people are encouraged to attack and feed off the bones of those few remaining who work, or to resent the encroachment of some foriegn population. Jealousy and xenophobia are ever the tools of the overlords, whether they be feudal barons or lords of capital. Yuck.
Well, that’s one way of looking at it. I don’t like to use Marxist terms, but the “proletariat” defined as wage earners and most salary earners is as big as it ever was. It’s just poorer relative to the owners of the “means of production.” It’s less organized. And it’s getting reamed like it hasn’t been reamed since the 1920’s.
10% Unemployment, 20% underemployment. Booming stock market. Workers are being removed from the equation.
Also, are the workers at fast food joints and gas stations a part of the proletariat? How about the drones in the cube farms? I’m no expert, but to me the idea behind organizing proletarian workers as proletarian workers is that they are the creators of real wealth. Many of today’s workers simply perform necessary but trivial functions. They will be replaced by cheaper automota as soon as possible. It doesn’t make sense to me that they are the creators of wealth and I doubt they would think so either.
Explicitly or implicitly, the proletariat as such is shrinking.
Let’s be clear what “proletariat” means. Here is its etymology:
That is to say, a man who’s only wealth comes from exploiting the labor of his children (and needless to say, himself) in agricultural or industrial labor.
The folks who can exploit them offer security; in the case of feudal barons, physical security from bandits. In the case of capitalists, financial security from penury. But those are also the things that the feudal lord offers the townsfolk (bourgeiosie) and capitalists offer the now-dwindling middle class.
Create an economic crisis by coddling mega corporations through de-regulation and cronyism, divide the electorate through resentment and fanaticism, cripple the tax base by declaring (in despite of the entirety of economic history) that only tax cuts can grow the economy, use the ensuing budget crisis to target successful public institutions (unions, social security) that had nothing to do with the economic crisis and actually ameliorate its effects, proclaim your ideological purity and political genius, create more financial insecurity, distract the economically insecure through incoherent/revisionist fantasies, target successful public institutions that stand in the way of enriching special interests at the expense of public welfare, use fanatical language about gays, abortion, guns, moslems and whatever the biweekly freak-out is to make sure that public discourse never has anything to do with reality, call your critics anti-american and whatever the pejorative flavor of the day is…
Having been a federal employee all my life, most of it spent in a highly unionized area, I have noted the Republican attempts to destroy labor’s power. In fact, what isn’t reported is that Reagan’s folks wanted a Patco II in the Post Office. Thanks to arbitration it didn’t happen.
My tea party sister in FLA is a teacher. Now she’s getting a taste of the wrong end of the stick, but in the scapegoating game the people who get screwed look down to find out why, not up.
So after they chew up and spit out unionized workers, what’s the next meal?
What’s next? Well, it seems they’ve made a pretty good start on people with skin color other than pale and there’s an all-out assault on womens’ health care and right to choose.
The next meal is the rest of the workers, of course.
I have been mulling over why it is that the Rep mindset defaults continually to ‘levelling down’ in our society.
In the Wisconsin instance, with Rachel’s point last night that the decision to bring the ‘budget’ bill to the floor is not based on addressing a shortfall in the budget but instead on breaking the Unions, makes me think the Koch brothers may have overplayed their hand here.
To choose Wisconsin as a first tier of a play to crush the Unions sorely misunderstood the history of Wisconsin and the spirit of democracy its people enjoy.
Why? The republicans can pass it on their own so their bill is going to pass and Wisconsin has been trending redder the last decade. Besides once it passes in Wisconsin it will be open season for all the other blue states. And there is not a damn thing the left can do about it. We’ve lost.
well, I’ve been saying this for years and no one listens to me.
I am starting to think seriously about a move to Chile in 10 years. If the US is unable to intervene in Latin America, then I think chile will become the South American version of Sweden.
Rep’s can’t pass it on their own because without the Dem’s in attendance there is no quorum. The longer the Dems stay out and the people draw attention to the broader implications of this Bill, while the Rep’s can’t shut them up, the better it is for the overall fight for Americans to understand that this is black and white class warfare.
We can join with them in solidarity with our time, energy and money and only hope this is truly an overreach by the MOU.
Because otherwise this would’ve been slightly off-topic.
President Obama has a much remarked upon Ronald Reagan fetish. It’s something I’ve been willing to give him a free pass on more or less. But if he really wants to seize the mantle of Reagan’s legacy, he should wake up to the fact that this is a huge part of it.
Reagan killed union labor in this country. It may still exist on the margins of the workforce, but it has never regained the approval of the American body politic that evaporated as quick as you could say “Commie” back when Reagan busted the air traffic controllers. Now, of course the corruption of unions that came out in the ’70s made Reagan’s move possible, but it was Ronnie who thrust the dagger in, and America as a culture has never looked back.
What about you, Presdient Obama?
He can’t do anything now though. He might have been able to do something when he was elected but that train left a long time ago.
Obama does not have a Reagan fetish. He has only complimented his political skills (selling optimism) and remarked on the fact that Reagan transformed this country. Listen to him and notice that he never says the direction Reagan took this country is good, only that he transformed it. We all know where Reagan took this country and Obama’s goal is to move it to the left.
I cannot believe that a smear from the primaries is still circulating as fact. Hillary was campaigning and what candidate wouldn’t seize upon a Democrat who “complimented” a Republican who many voters believe destroyed the country? She and her camp knew what he said and distorted it to win votes. Now it comes up again and again just because it fits the false and idiotic narrative that Obama is a secret Republican.
Obama has brought up a lot of other people in his speeches throughout the years, yet the left chooses to tack on to his mentions of Reagan. His oval office rug has a quote from MLK but you guys call his mentions of Reagan a fetish. He put a bust of MLK in/near his office and yet you say he has a fetish for Reagan.
You may be right about the fine print of Obama’s statements, but they were still incredibly stupid politics. It isn’t a Reagan fetish that’s the problem, it’s a fantasy about “one nation” full of well-intentioned folks who just need to communicate. Which is total bullshit.
Thank you! Yes Obama loves Reagan, whatever….
Kasich here in Ohio is doing the same thing: busting unions and the government workers right to negotiate. He is also among the first of the “new” governors to refuse the light rail proposal, sending Federal money back to New York or New Jersey. He promptly seated an all white, mostly male cabinet until protests from minority groups forced him to make a few minority appointments, or maybe just one. I lost interest when he tried to make it sound like everyone else was accusing him unjustly.
We are stuck with this asshole. Ohio, which had edged into being a Blue State and voting for Obama, has rebounded as a Big Red State of Idiots. We’re protesting as Wisconsin is, but it’s an uphill battle.
Here’s the raw power equation. If these governors become so toxic to the long-term (or short-term) futures of the Republican Party, they will (be) resign(ed). Only large numbers of people in the street can make that happen.
So now to the shift in public attitudes to public employee unions. Aside from the increased money devoted to sliming public unions, the main change that affected this is the shift of corporate taxation to individual taxation and the reducing of the progressivity of the taxes. In the midst of 40 years of real economic decline for the middle class, taxes became the only financial impact that people thought they could control–thus the anti-tax movement.
Also the folks who lost money in their 401(k)’s are angry at many states’ defined benefit pensions. What they don’t know is that those pensions are underfunded. Public employees will never see all of the pension money that they were promised in exchange for lower pay.