Faced with the suspiciously coincidental and simultaneous threat in several states to destroy public sector unions and their collective bargaining rights, union members and their supporters are going into action to defend these rights won with the blood, sweat and tears of generations. Both these proposed laws and the opposition are still spreading--even to here in California.
The facts involved appear to be irrelevant. Public sector wages and benefits have nothing to do with the fiscal distress of state governments, and these proposed actions won't make the situation better anyway. Unions in Wisconsin have already agreed to the cuts in benefits that bill proposes, but the governor and Rabid Right supporters are doing the bidding of the wealthy and the corporations (who will be getting new tax breaks in Wisconsin, meaning that state revenues will decline and the deficit grow.) They are out to destroy the unions.
So what matters now it seems are the feelings, the recognitions. Will the voting public see these efforts as some courageous stand by cost-cutting heroes, as they did when Reagan fired air traffic controllers and destroyed their union? Or will they see this for what it is--politically motivated, racially tinged class warfare?
Though some believe that the Rabid Right has succeeded in masking the class war with anti-government deficit-reduction rhetoric, there also seems to be more support and understanding of the role of unions-- and more memory. Public sector unions aren't exactly like the old industrial and craft unions. Their members are well aware of their responsibilities to the public as well as to themselves and their families. By and large, their bargain has been to take lower wages in exchange for good pensions and benefits, which helps the state and local governments partly because the costs are spread out over time.
But their unions--the last really strong unions--are heir to union history that has all been about rich capitalists and their political minions opposing every right and benefit that working people have ever requested, and then demanded. Including an end to child labor, a living wage, a reduction from 12 and 10 hour days, workplace safety, health and retirement benefits.
That history is a living history, at least for me. I grew up in western Pennsylvania, where the very ground is soaked with the blood of those who died for the right to unionize. One of my grandfathers--and his father before him--were coal miners, and part of those decades of struggles from the late 19th century into the 1940s. Without the union, my grandfather would not have received a pension and benefits for black lung disease that provided for his old age. And for all my education, all the celebrities I've met and all the big name publications I've written for, I am without a union and I have no such assurance.
In my childhood I can remember secretly listening to stories my father and his brothers and their father told as they played cards in the basement of the house that the coal company had built and owned--a house without an indoor toilet until the 1950s-- about the strikes, the hunger and the violence. The landscape was full of that history. I remember a high school classmate pointing out the valley where coal miners had lived, and where the company had ringed searchlights along its rim trained all night on the houses below, to watch for any movement that might suggest a union meeting. The photo above is of Pennsylvania state troopers getting ready to attack workers at the Homestead steel mill--a piece of landscape not far from where I lived in Pittsburgh in the 90s.
Labor unions never were perfect institutions, nor are they now. But they are all that working people have to protect them against the predations of the uber wealthy, like the Koch brothers who some believe may be directly behind this union-breaking push. That's true for union members but also others, through the protections and policies that unions advocate. Without unions, the corporations funding the most insane and self-destructive political policies in American history will have free reign.
People are in the street in the Middle East fighting for their freedom. People in the United States have risked just as much--they've risked being beaten and shot in the street--to establish unions and collective bargaining rights. They are in the streets again to keep those rights, and not go back to the penury and near-slavery of the past. Does that sound overdramatic? Ask somebody depending on the pension they worked all their lives to earn. Ask somebody without a pension who is listening to the Rabid Right talking about destroying Social Security and Medicare.
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