The NYT picks up on the growing effort in the states to take on public employees.
State officials from both parties are wrestling with ways to curb the salaries and pensions of government employees, which typically make up a significant percentage of state budgets. On Wednesday, for example, New York’s new Democratic governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, is expected to call for a one-year salary freeze for state workers, a move that would save $200 million to $400 million and challenge labor’s traditional clout in Albany.
But in some cases — mostly in states with Republican governors and Republican statehouse majorities — officials are seeking more far-reaching, structural changes that would weaken the bargaining power and political influence of unions, including private sector ones.
For example, Republican lawmakers in Indiana, Maine, Missouri and seven other states plan to introduce legislation that would bar private sector unions from forcing workers they represent to pay dues or fees, reducing the flow of funds into union treasuries. In Ohio, the new Republican governor, following the precedent of many other states, wants to ban strikes by public school teachers.
What's not mentioned in the article are things like New Jersey governor Christie's raiding of public coffers at the expense of teachers, firefighters and cops to provide tax cuts for the rich, the kind of trade-off that we're seeing far too much of on the state and local level.
Gawker's take on the story is more to the point:
Why is our economy in the predicament that it's in today? High unemployment, sluggish growth...who's to blame? The unions, of course. The unions are the enemies of the working man. The working class must destroy unions for their own good.
Unions are the perfect scapegoat: an organization that benefits a relatively small number of actual members, which a mass of disgruntled outsiders can be easily convinced to blame for their own problems. (Immigrants are another good scapegoat!) Like the push to convince the public that our national debt is the fault of a few politicians' pet earmarks—expenditures that grab attention easily, but that make up a laughably small portion of the spending we actually need to cut—blaming unions for unemployment is a brilliant stroke of political jujitsu, because it appeals to the very people that would naturally be allies of organized labor: the working class.
It's an old tactic--"right to work" was passed in so many states in the Reagan era and immediately after by pitting working class people against organized labor. Nothing works better, particularly in an economy as fragile as this one with skyrocketing unemployment than fomenting anger within the have-nots against the have-a-little-mores.
Public employees have jobs like everyone else. The right of workers to unionize should be a fundamental one. No one is claiming that unions are perfect; but if we're going to start destroying imperfect things, the statehouse would be a more beneficial place to start than the union hall. It's one thing to discourage firefighters from striking—something that could immediately lead to people's deaths. It's quite another to threaten to fire every teacher in Ohio because they used the means available to them to ask for better working conditions. It's not like they can depend on the good will of John Kasich to not screw them....
So: municipalities and states that entered into pension and benefit agreements with their employees, and then, through horrifically poor financial planning combined with the overall collapse of the global economy due to Wall Street's insatiable appetite for handing out subprime loans, found themselves unable to honor those agreements. This means that public sector unions themselves—not the elected officials who fucked up the states' finances—are bad. Therefore, private sector union workers who are natural allies of public sector unions should turn against them, until they are destroyed. This will benefit you, common working man. We promise!