Solidarity is one of the bedrock principles of the labor movement. It has a pretty sound strategic and tactical basis: you can't win if your ranks are divided. I don't mean that you can't have debate. I mean that we have to support certain general principles. Here is an example: public employees are not to blame for budget problems.
Yesterday, I did a radio interview/call-in show with the main news station in Buffalo. A man called in with roughly the following point: what are you going to do about the generous benefits that unionized public employees have gotten, benefits that are bankrupting the state, and how are you going to stop those workers from being involved politically to influence their "bosses" to give them more? I think is tone was far more hostile but you get the point.
This isn't the first time I've heard this. But, at a time of great financial crisis, I know this kind of sentiment will increase--unless we are vigilant.
Because the vast majority of workers are not union, most people have no security, no dignity at work, no decent way to support a family because their wages have been flat for 30 years.
Rather than look at the core reason for our financial calamity, some people are turning to blame those who have been able to make a decent living--almost entirely because they are lucky to have a union. Because it is sometimes difficult to see the true culprits, many angry and desperate people find it easier to see union members as the source of the problem.
So, let's just talk about the FACTS.
1. States are in financial trouble because (a) the general financial collapse has robbed states of revenues from dues-payers in society and (b) the general trend to starve government of the needed funds to build roads, schools and other basic things we take for granted.
2. The crippling of government is not an overnight phenomena but one that is the logical result of thirty-plus years of a BI-PARTISAN attack on a progressive tax system. In New York, to take one example, if we returned to the more progressive tax system we had in the 1970s, we would have 7-9 billion dollars more in dues that we need to keep a decent society operating. That would almost entirely come from asking the richest 1 percent to pay their fair share. And it would mean a TAX-CUT for 95 percent of New Yorkers. But, neither party is willing to make that argument in a full-throated courageous way--and we have a governor, who was once called a "liberal", who is willing, for the sake of re-election, to let workers take the p.r. hit because they are an easy target.
Our country is not in the midst of the greatest divide between rich and poor in 100 years because of public employees. The general financial crisis did not happen because public employees got a decent wage and have a pension that is a modest financial cushion to make sure retirement is not a path to poverty.
It's because of the Goldman Sachs mentality, which I made clear last week at a rally in front of Goldman Sachs:
So, let us not turn against each other. We know what must be changed.
UPDATE [10:42 Eastern): Friends, I have to run--a campaign trip upstate and the weather is wild so...but...two observations:
On the question of economic justice and freeing ourselves from corporate control, Kirsten Gillibrand is symptomatic of the problem: she is awash in corporate PAC money--from Goldman Sachs, to Morgan Stanley to Citigroup, Altria Group (tobacco), Boeing, Northrup, Lockheed. The very interests fighting the changes of the financial system--even the modest ones suggested by the Administration--are the very interests funding my opponent's campaign. That is just a fact, If you want real change--meaning, freeing ourselves from the corporate vise that has impoverished people throughout the nation--I respectfully suggest that that is not a "progressive" candidate.
Second, I am not one of those people disappointed in the Administration. I expected to be exactly in the place we are in now. The issue is not the president. The issue is US. When will progressives truly break from supporting a corrupt and dysfunctional system which allows people like my opponent to adopt the mantle of "progressive" with a straights face?