I’m watching Governor Walker lie through his teeth right now. He’s using the old saw that he has to take away bargaining rights because the government needs the “tools” to deal with their budget problems. It appears that he was too stubborn and unskilled to deal with collective bargaining when he was a local official so he thinks that every official can’t do it. Get this straight, collective bargaining is the "tool" to deal fairly and equitably with employees. Taking it away gives government a weapon, not a tool.
Do not think for a minute that Walker wants anything less than complete destruction of the unions. Take just one piece of his bill: payroll deduction. If you cut off payroll deduction, you make it so that unions cannot even pay their staff. It would take weeks, if not months to set up a system to collect checks from members. In that time, the funding stream would be cut off. Bills would be unpaid. Savings accounts would be drained. Even if the new system could be put up quickly, unions aren’t prepared to deal with dunning people who don’t pay on time or regularly. And that is not the relationship they want to have with their members. The deal with the members, from the time they voted in their union, was to take the money upfront, as painlessly as possible. There is no reason, none whatsoever, to cut off payroll deduction except to destroy a union.
Look folks, the public benefits from good labor relations, whether in the public or the private sector. Unions stabilize a workforce. Union workers are usually better trained, often because the union helps provide or bargains for the training. Union workers are more productive. They have a sense of job security that improves their morale and work rules are clear so they can’t be randomly jerked around. If change is needed, there is a clear process—collective bargaining—to get that done. Work rules go both ways—there are things that the workers have to do as well as management.
I could go on and on. Are unions perfect? Of course not. But show me a business or a government agency without unions that is perfect. Where is it? We all want to know.
The government didn’t have to bust UAW to get concessions for the auto industry. There was heavy pressure for sure, and I think the workers had to give up more than their fair share, but they did it through collective bargaining. At the bargaining table, both sides are equal and both sides eventually agree. Let’s summarize: meet, talk, give and take, agreement. Any manager or official who can’t deal with that is incompetent.
But that’s not really it, is it? What Walker and his ilk really want is to destroy the Democratic Party. Because unions and especially public employee unions, fund Democratic and progressive candidates and provide boots on the ground for them. Now mind you, the unions don’t support Democrats because they are Democrats. They support Dems because those politicians generally vote in a way that helps working families, not hurts them. Every election season, my union makes politicians fill out issue-based questionnaires, we examine their voting records, and often we interview them. Any Dem who doesn’t pass the test doesn’t get our help. Any Republican who does pass can get our support—although there are fewer and fewer each year. In our state, one of the last moderates was defeated by a tea partier last year.
I think most of us here at Kos accept the idea that our country has become a plutocracy. Maybe the optimists would say we are right on the verge. If the plutocrats and their tea party goons can break the unions, they break the grassroots of the Democratic Party--and drive it further into the hands of the rich. They already have control of the “right to not work” south; now they just need to pick off the rest of the country state by state. The war, bloody and protracted, whatever the outcome in a state, will drain the coffers of many unions. They won’t be able to contribute as much next year for the presidential race. Meanwhile the corporations can put more money than ever into the race.
All of this is calculated and has been planned for a long time. I only wish that our side could plan so well. But we do have one thing: we have a true passion, not just rage and fear. The people in Wisconsin and Ohio are fighting because they care and believe in their unions and their rights, not because they hate their president and want to destroy liberals. They are fighting to save something real and measureable, not some mythological interpretation of the constitution or the “Christian nation.” Join their cause and find a way to take to the streets, either literally or figuratively. It’s time.
(Fair disclosure: I’m a union leader. But I am a union leader because I believe unions are doing the right thing. I am not greedy, I am not selfish. I work ten hour days often six days a week. I don’t make a lot of money. I don’t have a lot of perks. But I don’t bow to power and that makes lots of powerful people angry—even in our little part of the world.)