2011 archive

In Wisconsin, Republicans reveal their long-tern goals: Rolling the clock back to reinvigorate the meaning of “slave” in the phrase “wage slave.”

Dick Polman explains the rightwing’s union-busting tactics. A nugget (emphasis added):

The new Republican governor’s bold bid to strip public employee unions of their collective-bargaining rights is not just a parochial skirmish about finding money to close the budget deficit. It’s about exploiting that state deficit for political gain, using it as an excuse to declare war, and perhaps eviscerate, the last healthy sector of the labor movement – a strategy nurtured these past four decades by national conservative strategists and their well-heeled backstage business donors.

(snip)

But conservatives smell a greater golden opportunity in all that red ink. They’ve previously ridiculed Rahm Emanuel’s ’08 quip about how “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” but now they’ve adopted it – by launching a radical attack on the core principle of collective bargaining. If successful, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, they might achieve their aim of turning back the clock to the era, circa 1929, when all workers were at the mercy of their employers.

I am not a big fan of individual unions, but for a long time I was in a union job, a member of TCU local 1506, and I held my union card (and paid my dues) for two decades–as long as I was with the railroad–after leaving the union job for management.

By and large, unions have done far more good than bad. They have certainly done far more good for average Americans than has Goldman-Sachs.

Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to read up on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory; Harlan County, Kentucky; and the Pullman Strike.

It wasn’t the workers who were packing lead; it was the bosses.

My first father-in-law, one of the finest and fairest men I have ever known, could tell stories of being shot at for his activities on behalf his fellow railroad union members not so long ago.

Dennis G. lines up a fascinating collection of maps through time at Balloon Juice to illustrate trends in labor-management relations–efforts by the plutocracy to keep wages low–as moderated by the states through time. He starts with slavery, moves though convict-labor, and reaches the contempororary era.

I commend it to your attention as context for the Republican attack on workers.

Here’s his bit on the double-talk (emphasis added):

This system of boldly stealing the labor of convicts lasted into the 1930s (and versions of it still can be found in almost every State of the Union). It was FDR and the new Democrats of the New Deal who passed a series of laws that made the theft of labor more difficult and help workers to organize and collectively bargain for a fair and living wage. It work. A great middle class in America was created and for almost fifty years prosperity was shared.

The effort to push back against labor rights started almost immediately. By 1947 this movement was able to pass the Taft Hartley Act and open the door to new restrictions to the rights of workers. By the Reagan era in the 1980s, the movement to steal labor was repackaged and resold to the most gullible and cynical among us. Since then it has picked up a lot of steam. Laws to restrict the rights of workers have been given the very Orwellian name, “Right to Work” laws—as in in you have the right to work, but not the right to come together and ask for a fair deal. In a “Right to Work” State, a worker is on his or her own. The State will always fight against you. You are on your own sucker and you just have to deal with it. In a “Right to Unionize State” you have back-up, regardless of whether or not you work in a Union shop.blockquote>

February 21, 2011 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Political Economy | Bookmark this post