While North Africans are shaking off the dictatorships of Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi, Americans are losing their hard-won rights at home. You may have seen the bumper sticker “The Labor Movement: From the Folks who brought you the Weekend.” Well, this very movement is now being imperiled by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who is seeking to ban collective bargaining by public-employee unions.
Scarily enough, Walker is encouraging other Republicans to follow his lead in trampling workers’ rights. Jay Bookman quotes Walker in his article “Where Wisconsin Leads, Few are Following”:
“There’s a lot of us new governors that got elected to do something big…This is our moment.” If by “big” you mean drag workers back to the early twentieth-century, congratulations Governor Walker.
Bookman’s argument that “few are following” Wisconsin’s example seems specious in light of the fact that one state, Nevada, has already outlawed collective bargaining for state employees. Moreover, the Republican Governors Association is trying to drum up statements in support for Walker via a “Stand with Scott” website. So far, four Republican governors — Rick Perry of Texas, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Bob McDonnell of Virginia — have posted general statements of support.
Moreover, Deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox (who is now, thankfully, ex-Deputy Attorney General), went as far as to advocate for the use of force against protesters. As he told a Mother Jones reporter on Twitter, the use of “live ammunition” would be acceptable against protestors in Madison, Wisconsin. “You’re damned right I advocate deadly force,” he said. It boggles the mind to imagine how this guy was able to achieve his position in the first place.
In somewhat more optimistic news, according to BoingBoing, “Ian’s, a pizzeria near the Wisconsin state capitol that is sympathetic to the demonstrators, had been facilitating the process of supporters around the world who want to send pizza to the protest. They’ve fielded an order from Egypt — now that’s solidarity.” Delicious, delicious solidarity.
As the late Howard Zinn noted two years ago, “It will take a reinvigorated labor movement to have a great social upheaval in this country that can turn things around.”
When we have a governor who wants to ban collective bargaining, an (albeit former) attorney general who advocates the use of force and a workforce that is 90 percent non-unionized, it seems a little social upheaval is necessary. Or at least a pizza party.
The two scariest threats to working people are a government intent on a socialist agenda despite all history and economic evidence to the contrary, and the emergence of monopoly power (properly, monopsony) in organized labor. Nobody is more supportive or prouder than the US Labor movement in the early 20th century than I am. But the anecdotal evidence in MA alone points out the pitfalls of public sector unions. The federal and interstate efforts brought to bear in Wisconsin are also indicative of the dangers of this two-headed monster. Extreme responses to the situation (I hadn’t heard about the live-fire dialog) don’t render public service workers unions righteous; nor do they prove the Governor’s position incorrect, only the methods he is willing to use.
What socialist government are you talking about? Surely not the one where debt-escalating tax cuts are extended and total corporate personhood is enshrined by the highest court?
I’d say the absolute fusion of corporation and state is the most dangerous thing to working people. The hollowing out of the American labor force, coupled with the largest transference of wealth in history, a for-profit health care system, a gargantuan and unstoppable national security industrial complex and little to no regulation of industry — from Wall Street to Big Oil — results in the exact situation we currently find ourselves in.
And it appears your prescription is for more of the same.
Um, yes, the socialist administration in question IS that of Mr. Obama.
The extension of tax credits to stimulate investment and innovation are useful but essentially a tool only needed to offset the burden of a gluttonous federal bureaucracy (which has grown under Republican and Democratic administrations).
We agree about the fusion of corporation and state being dangerous to people – said another way, the nationalization of industry, the ownership of the means of production by the state.
The American workforce has been hollowed out by declining competitiveness, caused by a sense of entitlement (my opinion). Legislating artificially low prices, or collective-bargaining artificially high wages is unsustainable. Today’s blue-collar worker enjoying a $100K total compensation package is tomorrow’s unemployed worker, wondering why his company moved. In the long term, unless you are the best value for your employer, the best person doing the best job in the right place for the right cost, you have a problem.
The issues you raise are very real – engendered by an elite political class (again, Republican and Democrat) which busies itself making laws that don’t apply to them, expropriating wealth and power from the citizenry. Politics was never intended by the founders to be a career. It’s another face of the Agency problem, well articulated in Berle and Means (1932).
Finally, I didn’t offer a prescription at all, but rather than allowing you to impute one to me, may I offer:
1.) Term limits, at least at the federal level
2.) Congress shall make no law that does not apply to itself (e.g. separate pension and health care)
3.) Dramatic roll-back of entitlement programs
4.) Re-focusing the role of the federal government to its original constitutional mandate: Promote the common good, etc.
The free market is one of the most powerful tools for social good the world has ever seen. Distortions to free markets, including monopoly, monopsony, and externalities, are best seen to by governments. But understand there is dead-weight cost of any government intervention, so the size of government should be held to an absolute minimum, and government intervention should happen only as a last resort, and generally slowly.
I’m not surprised that we agree on much of this. You are a bit more of a market liberal than I, however. Particularly in terms of the scope of intervention into markets that can be very quickly lopsided and anticompetitive due to the tremendous downward pressure of verticals and the inability/unwillingness of DOJ to regulate them under an outdated Sherman Act. Not to mention the vagaries of a fully automated and seethingly complex global derivatives landscape.
The purely political remedies I’m with you on, at least conceptually.
Bravo! These are scarey times for working people. Wake up America!