Sunday, June 19, 2011

The Long History of Labor Bashing

By Nelson Lichtenstein

When he was still President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, now mayor-elect of Chicago, famously quipped: "Never allow a crisis to go to waste."

Republican governors in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, and other states have certainly taken that advice to heart. By emphasizing, and in some cases manipulating, the red ink flowing through so many state budgets, they have leveraged the crisis to strike a body blow at the public-sector unions that represent so many teachers, professors, social workers, and municipal employees. The collective-bargaining rights of the police and firefighters, often a privileged caste, are also being threatened in some states.

Unionists and Democrats denounce this as opportunism, and in Wisconsin they have made the case that there is hardly a fiscal crisis at all, that public-employee wages and pensions are not out of line with those in the private sector, and that collective bargaining works pretty well. Neither the Wisconsin Counties Association nor the League of Wisconsin Municipalities was consulted by Gov. Scott Walker when he drew up the anti-union legislation that he claims is necessary for the solvency of his state's counties, towns, and cities. Nor do officials of either group support the governor's initiative.

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