On! Wisconsin 0

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.