So my day started with a diary titled “Governor Walker is Caving!” I got on a plane, flew a few states away, and arrived at a union leaders’ conference where we spent the afternoon talking about good staff management. And then we took a break.
The diaries that are ending my day are titled “Wisconsin - Republican dirty tricks/Collective Bargaining vote held...loses 18-1” and “PUNISH Wisconsin Republicans for violating democracy” and “BREAKING: WI Capitol Re-occupied.” My heart is bolstered by the rallying of all my labor brothers and sisters and all our fellow progressives to the fight, but my heart also feels broken.
So we heard the news of the vote at our break. Everyone in that room leads or manages a union of one size or another. The news was flooding in on our Blackberries and I Phones as we gathered for a call from our union’s national president. But we could hardly talk to each other. We were thinking, I feel, about what it would mean to each of us if our members’ bargaining rights were stripped away, if we could not participate in politics at all, if we could not even collect dues. If you have not been in union leadership or close to someone who has, you can hardly imagine the fear and anger and despair.
We are used to abuse. The majority of media stories about unions are predominantly negative. We have always been flogged by the Right. Even the Democratic Party, though it could not have survived without us, barely supports us. We are used to fighting. It is our heritage. We are even used to losing. But we have our world and our special work, and we are as good stewards as we can be.
Everyone who works for or leads a union, who studies unions or supports them, knows that the forces of wealth and right-wing ideology strive constantly to weaken us. We knew they wished they could destroy us. But I don’t think anyone realized that they had crossed a line in the last few years so that they fully intended and carefully planned how to annihilate the public employee unions the instant they regained power in any collective bargaining state.
The attack is too well coordinated to be spontaneous. It can’t be that several states decided separately and coincidentally to wage war on public employees, safety workers and teachers and to break their unions. It can’t be accidental that the watchwords of the day are “by any means necessary” so that legislative procedures are warped to near the breaking point in order to pass legislation that is not needed or wanted, that is driven by hysteria and greed. “Shame, shame, shame,” the Democratic House members in Wisconsin cried, reassuring us at last that wherever the Party sometimes was, there were still individual Democrats who knew what was right and what was bad for this country.
“Shame.” This is it. We know this is it. The tipping point. Whatever happens in the next sixth months, the union movement will come out of it stronger than we have been in decades or we will come out of it on the road to irrelevance. We will not come out of it the same.
Whatever happens, it will be because of people like you. The progressive media is with us now, both in beliefs but also seeing that even its existence depends at least partially on us. Progressive organizations are coming forward in huge numbers. But not one billionaire will stand with us; all of them will stand against us and pour endless money into defeating us, or stand on the sidelines. Not one penny in taxes for hungry babies will they give if they can stop it, but millions and millions and millions into defeating union efforts to bolster the lives, the safety, the incomes of working families—and not just of the families we represent but of all families.
And many of those families hate us. Our people are in state capitols fighting to protect and expand unemployment compensation while a chunk of the unemployed and underemployed name themselves tea partyists and join in vilifying the only organizations who are trying to protect them as workers.
But more families are waking up. The only hope for us is that all those people who used to say that they would join a union if they could will continue to stand with us and speak with us as though they were in those unions. They would join us if they could and we would have them if we could. So if not legally yet, at least in spirit, we can.
Because we all know now that it isn’t about the state budgets. It isn’t really even about the unions. It’s about unlimited power. It’s about money wanting more money and being willing to do anything to get it to anyone at any time. It’s about money wanting power so it can institutionalize its crazy ideas about money and power. It’s about people with money and power believing to the core of their beings they are better than we are, they are smarter than we are, they are more deserving than we are. And if they drive the entire middle class of America into poverty, we deserved it. The mere fact that we haven’t been able to stop it so far proves that we deserve it.
So shame on us if we don’t stop it.
Solidarity.
Updated by bently at Thu Mar 10, 2011, 09:42:54 AM
As one of many people who spoke their heart in recent days and ended up for the first time on the Rec List, I thank you. And now off to more conferencing and planning with my union brothers and sisters. We'll do our best to live up to your support for us.