This article covers union busting by the Republican Party in their continuing attack on the middle class.
The protests in Wisconsin have set up a national debate about unions and wages. Governor Scott Walker, (R), has introduced a bill that would end collective bargaining for public unions. It also has a provision in it that would make it illegal for an employee to have union dues collected if they don’t want to pay the union dues. Without the employees contributing, the union would be gone. The company, without the union to protect the employees, would then begin to drop wages, as happens in right-to-work, (RTW), or non-union, states.
Gov. Walker insists this bill is to balance the budget. However, taking away the collective bargaining rights and destroying the union has no effect on the budget. None. The union has already agreed to all of the monetary concessions in the bill. This isn’t about the budget or anything else. This is an attempt to make Wisconsin, (ironically the birthplace of unions and collective bargaining, and probably the reason it is starting there), a right-to-work state.
Over the past thirty years, the unions have seen a steady decline in membership across the country. During those same thirty years, middle class wages have actually fallen when inflation is taken into account. The richest Americans have also seen their wealth, and their share of the wealth in America increase exponentially during the same period. Are these coincidences? No. It is a coordinated right wing attack against the middle class in an effort to transfer the wealth of the nation up to a very few select individuals and to improve the bottom line of corporate America.
Unions have gotten a bad rap in this country. Mostly that is because of the way that the right wing has been able to frame it. States without unions are called “right-to-work” states. Those with unions are called “forced-unionization” states. The latter sounds really bad, while the former sounds good. This is exactly 180 degrees from the truth. Who, after all, wants to be forced to join a union? You are not forced to join a union unless you go to work at a union shop. I live in a state that has unions and I have never been forced to join a union. The reason is simple: I never joined a union shop because I didn’t want to have to deal with the union practices. That was my choice. It is the same if someone doesn’t believe in war. They wouldn’t choose to work in an industry that enabled that war. It is a choice. The right wing wants to take that choice away from the American people. On the other end, the states that don’t allow unions are not right-to-work states; they are states where it is possible to pay you less. A right-to-pay-less state in other words.
Unions in this country built the middle class and fought for many of the benefits the worker now enjoys. Without unions there wouldn’t be a 40-hour workweek. There wouldn’t be weekends or holidays off without unions either. The unions in this country also help set the wages for the middle class. Without having to compete with unions, companies could pay a lot less in wages and benefits and then improve their bottom line: A huge transfer of wealth upwards to the CEOs and shareholders.
If you want to know how becoming a RTW state will do for your state, let’s take a look at the states that are RTW states. Right to Work States Map As you notice from the map in that article, most of the RTW states also happen to be the states that tend to vote for Republicans. That is not surprising since busting unions is a right wing policy and goal.
Republican states are also the states that tend to do the worst in almost every metric, except corporate taxes. They are the poorest and the least educated states. They are the states with the biggest budget crises right now. They are also the states with the lowest corporate taxes.
One of the conservative philosophies is individual, personal responsibility. They believe that a person should be responsible for his or her own life, from cradle to grave, regardless of the circumstances. This is why they are against social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Unemployment Insurance etc. It is also why they are against the government giving money to the Arts, or PBS, or NPR etc. People who use those programs are shirking their personal responsibility in the their eyes.
Along with that philosophy is a “survival of the fittest” mentality. That is the ultimate in personal responsibility. Give people the least you can, and those that are able to crawl to the top deserve to be there and to Hell with everyone else. You can sugarcoat it all you want and make it sound better than it is, but that right there is the conservative viewpoint.
What is happening in Wisconsin and beginning to happen in other places is a deliberate attempt to break the unions in this country. They are starting with public unions, but they will turn to private unions afterward. For a while there was a bill in Indiana to take away collective bargaining rights for private unions, (there are no public unions since those have already been destroyed in that state). They quickly backed off of that bill when they saw the massive protests going on in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
The unions are the last bastions of the middle class. Without the unions standing in the way, there is nothing to stop the corporations from driving middle class wages even lower than they are now.
This is it in a nutshell: Conservatives want everyone to have personal responsibility so they want to do away with social programs. The conservatives also want to do away with unions.
Okay, so the conservatives would like this country to go back to before there were social programs and unions. That would be the late 1800s, early 1900s. It was the Gilded Age of robber barons. It was a time when companies owned entire towns and you got paid in company scrip. The song “Sixteen Tons” is about that time. Here are a couple of the lines from the song: “You load sixteen tons and what’d you get? You get another day older and deeper in debt. St Peter don’t you call me ‘cuz I can’t go, I owe my soul to the company store.” People would work for a company, live in the company town, and because they got paid in company scrip, they had to shop at the company store. The owners made sure they paid the right amount, and charged the right amount that their workers would always be in debt to them. It was a way of getting the workers to work harder.
This is the country that the conservatives see as America’s future; it is the Gilded Age. If you want to know what future the conservatives want for us, look at the states that are Republican states. The states where the average citizen is poor enough, they couldn’t afford college without help, help that the conservatives would like to see gone. Only rich people going to college in other words. They would like to see a country where the worker is at the mercy of the corporate world. They would like to see a country where if there is something wrong with you and you can’t work and have no one to help you, then you starve or beg, or steal.
The conservatives are no longer satisfied with part of their agenda; they want the whole ball of wax now. You can see it from the actions they have taken since they regained the majority in the House, and took so many governorships last November.
Because of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United Ruling, unions are the only entity that has the resources to match the corporations’ ability to spend large amounts of money in elections. Without unions, corporations will have an easier time getting their agenda enacted. We will become an effective one-party state. Republicans are helping the corporations achieve this goal of complete corporate control of our elections through their union-busting tactics.
That is not the America I want to live in. Nor do I think that the vast majority of Americans want that America either. I believe that a majority of Americans want to keep the safety nets for people. I believe a majority of Americans want the playing field between workers and corporations to be even. I believe that a majority of Americans want to have a middleclass; not just have the working class and the ruling class.
outofstepper.com
Research materials:
States Ranked by Median Household Income
ALEC Report Card on American Education: K – 12 Performance, Progress, and Reform
Who Rules America?
The United States of Inequality
Union Movement in U.S. in Serious Decline
Income-inequality
The Compensation Penalty of “Right-to-Work Laws
outofstepper.com