During yesterday's Twitter town hall meeting, President Obama was asked this question:
Mr. President, in several states we have seen people lose their collective bargaining rights. Do you have a plan to rectify this?
His answer was long-winded and disappointing. I live in Wisconsin. We've been through hell the past few months. As the questioner pointed out, many people have lost their collective bargaining rights. Judging by the President's non-answer, he has no plan to restore collective bargaining for those who have had it stolen from them, and he is no hurry to create one.
That's not the disappointing part. I said all through the Wisconsin protests that we did not need President Obama to come here to validate our movement. I said he needed us more than we needed him. It wasn't a criticism. I truly believed that we could handle this without the distraction of having the President walking the picket line with us. I thought it was strategically smart to keep him away. I still believe that.
I assumed he would do his part in Washington and elsewhere to fight for the right to collectively bargain. I thought he had our backs. Apparently he has been taken in by some truly ridiculous Fox News-style talking points. That's what I find disappointing. Here is his answer, with the truthy parts highlighted:
The first thing I want to emphasize is that collective bargaining is the reason why the vast majority of Americans enjoy a minimum wage, enjoy weekends, enjoy overtime. So many things that we take for granted are because workers came together to bargain with their employers.
Uh, oh. He's praising the Labor movement first. Here it comes...
Now, we live in a very competitive society in the 21st century. And that means in the private sector, labor has to take management into account. If labor is making demands that make management broke and they can’t compete, then that doesn’t do anybody any good.
Hmmm. The public employees of Wisconsin had already negotiated 100 million dollars in cuts at the end of the last governor's administration, but Scott Walker and the Republicans rejected the deal. How is a 100 million dollar cut an "unreasonable" demand?
In the public sector, what is true is that some of the pension plans that have been in place and the health benefits that are in place are so out of proportion with what’s happening in the private sector that a lot of taxpayers start feeling resentful.
So, since public employees generally earn less in salary in exchange for those marginally better benefits, they should now get a raise, right?
They say, well, if I don’t have health care where I only have to pay $1 for prescription drugs, why is it that the person whose salary I’m paying has a better deal?
They also say you were born in Kenya. $1? Give me a break. I'm covered under my wife's public employee health plan. I pay between $15 and $30 for a prescription, and it's been going up every year for a decade and the plan is being decimated next year.
What this means is, is that all of us are going to have to make some adjustments. But the principle of collective bargaining, making sure that people can exercise their rights to be able to join together with other workers and to negotiate and kind of even the bargaining power on either side, that’s something that has to be protected. And we can make these adjustments in a way that are equitable but preserve people’s collective bargaining rights.
I'll grant that this one is not a right-wing talking point, but apparently we can't make these adjustments in a way that are equitable but preserve people’s collective bargaining rights, because hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin's public employees just lost theirs.
So, typically, the challenges against bargaining rights have been taking place at the state level. I don’t have direct control over that. But what I can do is to speak out forcefully for the principle that we can make these adjustments that are necessary during these difficult fiscal times, but do it in a way that preserves collective bargaining rights. And certainly at the federal level where I do have influence, I can make sure that we make these adjustments without affecting people’s collective bargaining rights.
OK. So when exactly are you going to start speaking out forcefully? A rambling discourse on greedy public workers is not exactly a defense of collective bargaining rights.
I’ll give you just one example. We froze federal pay for federal workers for two years. Now, that wasn’t real popular, as you might imagine, among federal workers. On the other hand, we were able to do that precisely because we wanted to prevent layoffs and we wanted to make sure that we sent a signal that everybody is going to have to make some sacrifices, including federal workers.
Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah. That was one of Scott Walker's lines.
By the way, people who work in the White House, they’ve had their pay frozen since I came in, our high-wage folks. So they haven’t had a raise in two and a half years, and that’s appropriate, because a lot of ordinary folks out there haven’t, either. In fact, they’ve seen their pay cut in some cases.
Translation: I'm going to be signing some more free trade agreements. You're all screwed. Deal with it.
Remember the original question? "Mr. President, in several states we have seen people lose their collective bargaining rights. Do you have a plan to rectify this?"
He should have just said "No. I don't. Next question."