Hopefully, this, my never-ceasing rant, is a mantra that I might finally lay to rest in the nest year or two:
Everything bad has been caused by George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney.
As a opposed to:
Labors unions are the cause of everything that goes wrong.
Tangling with some bloggers on the Wall Street Journal site about whether or not General Motors will declare bankruptcy, one poster erupted:
Your ability to blame no one but the Bush administration for everything under the sun is amazing.
Of course, I blame Bush/Cheney deliberately on every point because I well know that it enrages the conservative wing.
On the other hand, my worthy opponent went back to the favorite meme of conservatives:
The reason for the auto industry's insolvency is, in part, because of old union rules.
Others chimed in:
...UAW featherbedding (workers sleeping in the parts stockroom racks and punching in and out their buddies who decided to spend the day in the bar) and idiotic work rules (pulling network cable requires an electrician, a plumber, a plaster, and a carpenter because there are pipes, ceiling tiles, and office walls in the work site)
or:
Big Auto (American that is) pays higher wages than production workers in nonunion auto firms and in the general economy. The health care costs of these workers are enormous (notwithstanding retired union members).
There was also a obligatory swat at those dratted "CAFE standards." And the capper:
Karen Hedwig Backman, you are an angry screwball.
I googled the term "blaming unions."
The concept has been around for a long, long time. I've only been bashing George W. Bush for 9 or 10 years (I didn't like the man when he was governor of Texas either). But, hidden in the dusty tomes of the Library of Congress, from a collection of "American Life Histories 1936-1940," a Frederick Savage (the Savage Wiener's predecessor?) opines that labor unions caused the Great Depression:
I can tell you the cause of this Depression....The depression really began along in the early [nineteen] hundreds when these damned unions began to form. Most of the men employed in large manufacturing plants, including the railroads, joined in with some union so they could compel the companies they worked for to pay them higher wages. Right there, the good feeling was destroyed between the men that did the hiring and the men that worked for them. They commenced to have strikes, stand up strikes and sit down strikes. That wasn't good either for labor or for the owners of the mills, who had millions invested in their buildings and railroads....
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/...
Mr. Savage billed himself as the "Yankee Roamer," which to me sounds like the guy was a lazy bum. And, as far as "Northern" women, "He tells you with a roar he prefers Californian or Southern women -- 'they're lots easier to handle and quieter' than the northern girls."
Maybe the guy who billed himself as a "Yankee Roamer" was really a union buster, which has been around since the last half of the 19th century.
Among the tools of the trade of unions busting are:
"Dirty tricks," stuff like false incrimination, falsification of evidence, tapping the phone of a union organizer, feeding into managers' racial, class, and gender prejudices and fears.
Also, using propaganda, intelligence operations, legal obstruction, favoritism and division, creating an illusion of progress by portraying the company and its executives as benevolent, compassionate, and caring.
For a more complete list go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
I met a union buster once when I was in my salad days. Tried to pick me up. He was wearing totally denim but it was also totally new denim with, I suspect, designer labels all over the place. My wariness of the man was vindicated when he proudly whispered to me that he was "a union buster."
Fatal words!
Frankly, the whole agenda of union busting sounds dangerously like the political game plan of Karl Rove. Hopefully, Rove may be soon vaporized in the same manner as the dramatic exit of the witch in The Wizard of Oz, but union busting appears to have a far longer shelf life.