"Genuine public policy efforts,"
according to Americans for Prosperity
As Republican introduce wave after wave of anti-union measures in states across the country, unions see a broader strategy to "try to bleed us," as AFL-CIO political director Mike Podhorzer told the AP's Sam Hananel. Unions have to spend resources fighting on every front, countering attack after attack. Even the big victories, like the defeat of Ohio's anti-collective bargaining Issue 2, draw down unions' finite resources and prevent them from fighting offensive battles elsewhere.
Attempts to deny that this is what's going on don't hold water:
"It's not accurate to say there's some master plan to drain resources," [Americans for Prosperity President Tim] Phillips said. "These are genuine public policy efforts."
But Phillips said he thinks that, for the first time, unions have to confront organized grassroots opposition in a number of states.
"And Americans for Prosperity is absolutely a key component in that," Phillips said. "The unions have always had the advantage and we are now matching them."
The fact that the president of the Koch brothers front group Americans for Prosperity is talking about being grassroots opposition should give you an idea of how much to believe the rest of what he's saying. Because there's no question that there's a master plan.
It probably true that the plan is not just about draining resources. The goal is also to flood the zone so that even if unions and their allies manage to turn back some of the worst of what you've proposed, some bad bills still get through (and drain resources from unions and workers and government at every level). Last fall, Lee Fang reported that a for-profit education lobbyist and adviser to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and current Florida Gov. Rick Scott had said that:
[R]eformers should “spread” the unions thin “by playing offense” with decoy legislation. Levesque said she planned to sponsor a series of statewide reforms, like allowing taxpayer dollars to go to religious schools by overturning the so-called Blaine Amendment, “even if it doesn’t pass…to keep them busy on that front.” [...] Needling the labor unions with all these bills, Levesque said, allows certain charter bills to fly “under the radar.”
That's the plan, and it goes beyond unions. It's about making corporations more powerful, about privatizing government functions like prisons and education to increase corporate profits and decrease worker power. It's a sustained campaign to make a few billionaires, like the Koch brothers, richer and more powerful at the expense of the rest of us. That is the "genuine public policy" goal Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips meant.