In late 2008, as the government began debating whether to save General Motors and Chrysler from bankruptcy, conservatives saw an opportunity to open a new front in their decades-long war on labor unions. So a new talking point emerged, repeated first by representatives of conservative think tanks, then by conservative talk-show hosts and columnists, then by Republican members of Congress. The Big Three auto companies had been crippled, they said, by greedy United Auto Workers members whose absurd union contracts had them making an astonishing $70 per hour on average.
You won't be surprised to learn that the figure was utterly bogus -- the average pay of an auto factory worker at the time was actually around $28 an hour, or a decidedly middle-class salary of $58,000 a year. But even as a little-remembered component of a short-lived debate, it is a good case study in why the right is so effective. An idea like the mythical $70-an-hour autoworker can be created out of whole cloth, then quickly move through the conservative media and be adopted by opinion leaders at all levels. The left has neither an equivalent media structure nor the same willingness to grab talking points and stick to them so assiduously.
I bring up this story because something similar is beginning to happen -- another assault on unions, presented as something else entirely. Only this time, it isn't about bailouts, and autoworkers aren't the targets. The ostensible subject is the budget deficit, and the target is federal workers. And once again, the right is centering its assault on unionized workers around a tendentious, misleading figure: $120,000 a year. ...
For the last few decades, conservatives have waged a war on unions, one that has been largely successful. In the 1950s, a third of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today, only 7.2 percent of the private-sector workforce is unionized. Government is the last substantially unionized sector in the American economy, a place where people who do the public's work can get a good salary, good benefits, and job security. And that's the real reason they've become the right's latest target. |