is a must read. If you think the Boeing-IAM settlement stopped anything, think again. The NLRB is down to three members. If it goes to 2, it ceases to function. And Senate Republicans are determined (a) to confirm no new members while Obama is President, and (b) not to allow a recess so that Obama can do a recess appointment. They could not persuade the sole remaining Republican member to resign (which gives the Dems a 2-1 advantage for now), but member Craig Becker's appoint is about to expire at the end of this month.
You can read the whole piece here
Let me offer part of the article. I am going to start with part of one paragraph:
In the mid-20th century, 40 percent of private-sector workers belonged to unions; today, just 7 percent do. But the Republican struggle continues for two reasons. When it comes to elections, unions are still the most potent mobilizers of the Democratic vote — getting minorities to the polls and persuading members of the white working class to vote Democratic. Indeed, Republican gains among working-class whites (whom they carried by an unprecedented 63 percent to 33 percent in 2010) are, above all, the result of the deunionization of that class. An analysis of exit polling over the past 30 years shows that unionized white working-class men vote Democratic at a rate 20 percent higher than their non-union counterparts. For political reasons, Republicans are determined to de-unionize workers even more.
As is often the case, Republicans seek to pit Americans one against another. They will tout the non-union jobs being created in a time when people are desperate for jobs. They will then rile up non-union workers against unionized workers at the same time as they are seeking to undercut the very existence of unions.
But there is more . . . .
Let's look at the next, penultimate paragraph:
There’s another reason, too. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reports that in the third quarter, wages as a share of gross domestic product were the lowest they’ve been since 1929, and compensation (that includes health insurance) as a share of GDP was at its lowest point since 1955. Corporate profits as a share of GDP, by contrast, are the highest they’ve been since 1929. The destruction of private-sector unions has redistributed income to the rich, which is the Republican Party’s raison d’etre.
And there you have the important meme - redistribution of income to the rich is the Republican Party's raison d'etre. We see it in the funding activities of the Brothers Koch, especially through their long-term funding of ALEC, but in many of their other activities as well. I suspect that were we able to see the funding sources of Karl Rove's American Crossroads it would display a similar pattern, a pattern traceable to the 1970s and the famous memorandum by Lewis Powell that lead to the creation of much of the Republican infrastructure.
But we can look at it another way. We can go back to time when America was undoubtedly prosperous because we had not suffered the destruction of Europe and Japan during WWII. Yet Republicans saw an opportunity to go after unions, and in 1947 we got the Taft-Hartley Act, which was used to remove from private sector unions their ability to fully take advantage of their most powerful weapon, the strike. The provisions of Taft-Hartley (and remember, the Taft was Sen. Robert Taft who desperately wanted to be president, only to lose the '52 Republican nomination to the less conservative Eisenhower) were the beginning of the unraveling of the power of labor unions, even though it took a while before their full impact was felt.
At least in the 1950s, to balance the limitation of the power of unions the federal government - under Republican president Eisenhower - was willing to enforce some anti-trust legislation. Now we have the worst of all possible worlds: the power of ordinary people to influence through labor unions has been greatly rolled back; the power of corporate interests has been expanded first through limiting or eliminating regulations, then loosening the stricture against concentration of corporate power - this is seen not only in lessening of anti-trust actions, but also in the FCC under Michael Powell expanding the reach of media companies to control larger portions of broadcasting, and also in the expansion of a few financial institutions into humongous organizations that are now "too big to fail" and effectively no longer under control of our or any government; then finally, to prevent any possible political change unleashing the corporations through Citizens United to tilt what is left of the democratic processes in their favors.
I am in the public sector. I am unionized, a member of the National Education Association. We are also being targeted for destruction, because if the public sector unions can continue to wield influence, the corporatists and the banksters fear it might lead to a resurgence of private sector labor unions. They will do anything they can to prevent that from happening, because an increasingly unionized work force could actually successfully oppose them and roll back the power they have concentrated into their own hands.
Perhaps one reason someone like Frank Luntz is so fearful of OWS is because he has seen the unions backing the movement, and understands their willingness to back this opposition to the corporations, the financial institutions, the greedy 1%, has the real potential to rejuvenate and revivify the labor movement, especially given some of the more vocal and dynamic labor leaders now on the scene.
Myerson is right about this:
Which is why his final brief paragraph, which immediately follows those word,h is also worth noting:
Which is why the Republican war on unions — which is also the Republican war on the 99 percent — rolls on.
Whether or not you belong to a union, understanding that the war on unions is the war on all of us.