The Waning Power of  American Labor

My parents (who first met, so I'm told, at a Union Organizing Training Camp) devoted much of their adult lives to the cause of unionism.  Of course much has changed since the period between the 30's and late 50's  when they were most active and labor was the perennial underdog fighting for a voice at the bargaining table.  And that table today isn't management staring across at labor--it's management and government joining forces to kick labor out of the room.   


We're not talking about outrageous union demands.  We're not talking about union corruption.  We're not talking about having to make hard choices during hard times-- We're talking about the end of Collective Bargaining!  All to serve the short term political purposes of a handful of ambitious Con Artists ...

 Scott Walker's game was never deficit reduction...and the editorial in the NY Times last week made it quite clear that his true intents were all politically motivated:


"When Gov. Scott Walker moved to strip Wisconsin public employees of their collective-bargaining rights last year, a few weeks after taking office, it was clear that he wasn’t doing it to save the state money. If that had been the case, he would have accepted the unions’ agreement to pay far more in health care and pension costs. His real goal was political: to break the unions by demonizing their “bosses,” ending their ability even to collect dues and removing them as a source of money and energy for Democrats."

full editorial at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/opinion/the-message-from-wisconsins-recall-election.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

In 2010, there were only 11 major strikes and lockouts involving 1,000 or more workers, the second-lowest number  since the major work stoppages series began in 1947 (in 2009 there were 5), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week (see chart above). The decline in work stoppages over the last sixty years coincides with the ongoing decline in union membership as a share of all workers, from a high of 32.5% of all workers in 1953 (almost 1 in 3) to 11.9% in 2010 (fewer than 1 in 8, and for private workers only 6.9% are in a union, or fewer than 1 in 14).  From  Professor Mark J. Perry in Carpe Diem 

Chief Justice John Roberts ( as previously cited here with link to Jeffrey Toobin piece in The New Yorker that tells the story in great detail) led the charge to overturn over a century of reform in political campaign financing by opening the doors for corporations to underwrite political campaigns with virtually no limits or restrictions.  And now Scott Walker is paving the way for other State Governors and legislatures to overturn a hundred years of reform and open the doors for business and government to take back exclusive control of the entire game unfettered by the need to cooperate with labor.  

We're not talking about cutbacks or wage reductions or slashing benefits or  layoffs--we're not talking about unions having to bite the bullet in order for government to continue providing necessary services to the community, we're not talking about renegotiating pensions and retirement plans (many of which went in the red because they were invested like so many others in the phony mortgage market)  We're talking about the end of collective bargaining! 

And the most unbelievable thing about it is that much of the public is falling for it because the argument is being couched in terms of counter-acting the "socialist" policies of the Obama Administration.  It's a fraud, a hoax, a whatever you wanna call it as long as you don't call it "the truth".  Really unbelievable to me that 100 years of progress and reform is on the way to being tossed overboard without so much as a blink from the general public.  But then again, what constitutes "general public" anymore?  Everyone who watches, believes and votes according to what they see and hear on Fox News?  

And the Walker supporters consider Ronald Reagan  their patron saint--since it was he who broke the back of the Air Traffic controllers union 30 years ago which set the stage for the further erosion of union strength in both public and private sectors.


  "...More than any other labor dispute of the past three decades, Reagan’s confrontation with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, undermined the bargaining power of American workers and their labor unions. It also polarized our politics in ways that prevent us from addressing the root of our economic troubles: the continuing stagnation of incomes despite rising corporate profits and worker productivity."  Source: NY Times.

Funny, since Reagan was once a union boss himself. 


Reagan was the only president in American history to have belonged to a union, the Screen Actors Guild. And he even served six terms as president of the AFL-CIO attached organization. 


And he spoke out  for the collective bargaining rights of one of the world’s most famous and most influential trade unions, Poland’s Solidarity movement.

Reagan bluntly condemned the Polish government’s outlawing of Solidarity, and attacked it for making it “clear they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights —the right to belong to a free trade union”

REAGAN: " By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights—the right to belong to a free trade union."

Did he just say 'elemental human rights?'  Yeah, I thought he did.