I’m not sure we can call government worker pensions a "hot button" issue. It lacks the immediacy, clarity and simple polarity of, say, abortion or gay marriage.
But I guarantee that the controversy over retirement pay for millions of city, state and federal workers will fuel ongoing political debate, possibly for the rest of this decade.
And it will be divisive.
Sure, republican Meg Whitman, candidate for California Governor, is attacking public employee union benefits.
But a recent Los Angeles Times piece outlined the pension crisis in a nightmarish report from that city’s administrative officer, a subordinate of LA’s labor-friendly mayor Villaraigosa.
Now I want to take a step back and highlight a milestone which most of us missed.
Earlier this year, for the first time ever, the number of unionized government workers in the U.S. surpassed the number of private-sector workers.
This was terrible news:
Fewer than 7 ½ million Americans working for nongovernment employers belong to unions. That means that 13 out of 14 workers in the private economy are nonunion.
That also means that most of these workers are living in another universe from government employees with guaranteed lifetime retirement payments amounting to half or more of their annual salaries.
How can anyone expect Americans who occupy this vast nonunion labor pool to rally on behalf of unionized public employee "elites?"
And how will struggling working families feel about their tax dollars going toward ensuring a secure retirement for a small group of "privileged" workers.
You get the picture.
Beginning in the 1960s, campaigns across the country to organize teachers, firefighters, social workers, street cleaners, bus drivers and more were, in many cases, noble and heroic efforts. But they were a walk in the park compared to what was to happen in the corporate world - where deindustrialization and union-busting would become everyday activities.
So now when school districts, cities, counties and states face complicated questions around budget solvency, pension liabilities and their "obligation" to its workforce, public employees find themselves politically isolated.
Elected democrats often favored and helped cut the path for government union organizing because it created a reliable constituency for policy battles and elections. But many of those same democrats would barely lift a finger to enable private-sector unionization because that would pit them against their pals at the chamber of commerce.
Government workers and their unions are running head-on into their own version of "give-backs" and "take-aways" that characterized the corporate anti-union warfare of the 1980s and 1990s.
And with an ever-shrinking cadre of working-class allies from the private sector, the question is who is left to take up their cause.