The battle of public employees for their rights in Wisconsin is about fairness, the preservation and expansion of the middle class and keeping the American Dream alive. In the face of a vicious Republican and corporate assault on the ability of workers to negotiate for a better life, Wisconsin's workers are fighting back. They're standing up for their right to collectively bargain and they're standing up for all of us.
The tenacity, courage and commitment of the protesters have been extraordinary. The community support the workers have received has been inspiring. The people of Wisconsin are making history by drawing a serious line in the sand against unbridled corporate power and Republican extremism.
Throughout our nation's history, workers and their unions have fought for better wages, benefits and scores of trailblazing workplace improvements. At the bargaining table, the ballot box, in the halls of Congress and wherever important policy decisions are made, unions have fought for greater opportunity and shared prosperity, for the real American dream (Rachel Maddow has a great segment about Wisconsin's labor history which you can watch here).
In the post World War II era, unionized jobs with good pay and decent health care and retirement benefits helped create and expand America's middle class. It was the promise of America: If you worked hard and played by the rules, you could get ahead. And your kids could do even better.
That promise -- the American Dream -- has been made possible by the strength of the American labor movement and the sacrifices of countless workers and their families.
Today, union membership is down, unemployment is up and the current generation of young people is the first in years to expect that they won't be as well off as their parents.
Enter Governor Scott Walker, Speaker of the U.S. House John Boehner, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan and the rest of the Republicans who want an America run by and for the big corporations. Their agenda is to downsize government to dangerous levels, dismantle the public programs that keep our families safe and make our communities strong, export our jobs overseas and do whatever it takes to increase corporate profits and concentrate the nation's wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
These politicians are owned and operated by a powerful cabal of corporations and billionaires like the infamous Koch Brothers, who fund many right-wing front groups such as FreedomWorks who sent people to Madison from across the country this weekend to stage counter-protests.
These politicians and organizations are part of a nationwide effort to take away collective bargaining. They're also trying to take away the important cost-saving benefits and consumer protections of the Affordable Care Act. They want to privatize Social Security and eliminate Medicare as we know it. The want a government that's small enough to starve the poor, shrink the middle class and eliminate small businesses and big enough to regulate who we can love and marry. They want a government that looks the other way when oil companies recklessly drill offshore and mining firms operate without regard for the health and safety of their workers. And they want a government with enough reach to tell a woman, her doctor and her family what to do about private health care decisions.
We have a different vision of the world. As Paul Wellstone would often say, "We all do better when we all do better." We believe that work should be rewarded and workers treated with dignity and respect. We believe in an America where there is opportunity for everyone to achieve their potential and have fulfilling lives, including a secure retirement. We also believe in a robust government that does things we can't do ourselves to improve our collective quality of life. We believe in pitching in and helping each other out. The Republicans and their corporate sponsors believe in every man for himself -- the "you're on your own" theory of government and life.
We also believe in unions. As Bob Creamer says in his very fine piece on this struggle, the right to form a union is "an American value." He adds, "The right to form a union is critical to a democratic society because it is the only way to assure that employers do not treat their employees as commodities."
Ground Zero
It's these different visions that the battle in Wisconsin is about, beginning with worker's most basic rights. That's why teachers, correction officers, firefighters, nurses, administrative assistants, sanitation workers, social workers and so many others have banded together like never before. As AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee has said, Wisconsin is "ground zero" for the rights of public employees to unionize.
"If they succeed in Wisconsin, the birthplace of A.F.S.C.M.E., they will be emboldened to attack workers' rights in every state," McEntee says.
As we all know by now, the fight in Wisconsin is not about the money. To the extent that Wisconsin has a budget deficit, it is a problem of the Governor's own making, thanks to tax breaks he just gave to corporations. In fact, the workers have already indicated their willingness to negotiate over legitimate budget issues. Meanwhile, the Governor won't budge -- he continues to choose his ideological agenda over the people of Wisconsin.
As the New York Times explains, "In a year when governors across the country are competing to show who's toughest, no matter what the consequences, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin stands out as the first to bring his State Capitol to a halt." The paper continues, "Like many governors, he wants to cut the benefits of state workers. But he also decided a budget crisis was a good time to advance an ideological goal dear to his fellow Republicans: eliminating most collective bargaining rights for public employees."
The Governor's plan is to take away nearly all of the collective bargaining rights of public employees, which would have no impact on the state budget. They would be barred from bargaining about anything except wages, and any pay increase they win would be limited by the consumer price index. Contracts would be limited to a year, and union dues could no longer be deducted from paychecks.
As President Obama noted, with considerable understatement on Wednesday, Walker's proposal "seems like an assault on unions."
At the center of the battle in Wisconsin are AFSCME, SEIU, the teachers (AFT and NEA), the AFL-CIO and many other labor and community organizations. These are the same groups -- along with dozens of community, civil rights and faith groups and other unions such as the CWA, UAW and UFCW -- that have also been key players in the coalition Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and its grassroots campaign to win (and now promote and defend) the new health care law. Without the power of labor -- without the coalition of labor and community groups -- we never would won the health care law (labor has also been central to many other victories over the last two years, beginning with the election of President Barack Obama).
"We Stood Up Straight" -- The Memphis Strike
AFSCME is not unfamiliar with tough fights where the whole world was watching. In 1968, the sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, famously went on strike for better wages, benefits and working conditions and to get Mayor Loeb to recognize their union, AFSCME Local 1733. On April 3, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, the last formal remarks he would give before being assassinated the next day. He was in Memphis that night to support the strikers, who had walked off the job 51 days earlier.
Taylor Rogers was one of the strikers. During the nearly 10 years I worked at AFSCME, I had the honor of working with Mr. Rogers at events where he told the story of the strike. Just like Wisconsin's protesters, the Memphis workers went on strike for all of us.
One of Rogers' recollections of the strike is captured in a 2002 article in AFSCME's national magazine.
Rogers remembers the Memphis organizing events as if they happened yesterday. In 1964, Rogers and his co-workers figured that if they had to pick up other people's garbage, they were going to be respected for doing it. So they began to organize.In those segregated times, African Americans in the South who stood up and demanded justice were ridiculed and harassed. Mayor Henry Loeb and the city council, with the backing of the white community, ignored the workers' union representation with AFSCME.
In February 1968, a crisis erupted: The accidental activation of a packer blade in the back of a garbage truck fatally crushed workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker. "That's when the men said, 'We're tired and we ain't going to take anymore,'" recalls Rogers. "If you bend your back, people can ride it. But if you stand up straight, people can't ride your back. And that's what we did.
"We stood up straight."
The workers in Wisconsin are standing up straight in a big way. Let us all stand with them. There are lots of web pages where you can go to get updates and help. Here's one: www.wearewisconsin.org.
Follow Ethan Rome on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@HCAN
Howard Schweber: The Madison Protests: It's Not About the Money
The entire deception scheme depends upon getting us American’s to argue about small government big government so that we aren’t watching the ball. Inflate numbers, exaggerate facts, and twist meanings, are by design, the tools used to make reality almost incomprehensible to ordinary Americans.
The main concern for Americans, at this moment, should be how much more damage will be done to our government and democracy before our friends and neighbors understand and realize what really is happening, not just in Wisconsin but across the nation?
www.EliminateCorporateIncomeTax.com
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Curtis
I think you have read the situation incorrectly.
There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the public unions of Wisconsin are fighting for their own self-interest. Anyone knows that continuing to cave on their demands will result in the same untenable fiscal situation that has proven ruinous for the state of Wisconsin, subjugating taxpayer into indentured servants for an empowered administrative class and creating an increasingly hostile business environment that has resulted in fewer and fewer jobs.
The voter/taxpayer saw the last election as an opportunity to put their economic house in order and that requires dealing with the public unions, unions that did all they could to influence the election through campaign contributions, attack ads, hard support. The taxpayer/voter realizes that the public unions are not fighting to make Wisconsin a better tax jurisdiction, one that would lighten the load on taxpayers, increase new business and jobs coming to the state, and create a more responsible public workforce; but rather to maintain their own self-interests and their power to lord over the electorate. This requires that they keep their collective bargaining rights, rights from which their power emanates.
The people have spoken, not vicious Republicans and not corporate robber barons. The simple burdened voter. Let democracy take its course. It is time that the unions and their ironically named enablers, the Democrats, stop trying to subvert the will of the people.
Kai
That should read: ' There is no doubt in MY mind...'
You don't speak for the thousands of protesters on Wisconsin. It is so typical GOP: only your opinion counts and if I say it often enough MY opinion is ANYONES opinion, in the end people will believe you.
Sorry...not this time.
Thank you for your response.
Good point. I should have stated that there is no doubt on the outcome of the election and that the will of the people is clear. The millions of taxpayers have spoken loud and clear yet their will is being subverted by ‘thousands of rent-seekers’ and the Democrats that obviously represent them, not the people.
Kai
Well, maybe no doubts in the minds of Tea Partiers or Fox News junkies--but they're short on facts. The public unions have widespread support all across Wisconsin (and beyond) because they're fighting to preserve a basic right that originated in Wisconsin in 1959 and spread across America: the same right for folks who work in the public sector as for those in the private sector: the right to full collective bargaining. Wisconsin union members and their supporters are all taxpayers and voters, the same as anyone else. The fight is NOT about the Wisconsin state budget, it's exclusively about rights that helped to build America's middle class over the past half-century.
The GOP is trying to destroy the unions--especially the teachers' unions--because their membership contributes heavily to the Democratic Party. Any other assertion is just so much camouflage to hide that fact.
You say, "Let democracy take its course." Well. The demonstrators in Madison are chanting, "This is what Democracy looks like!" Tea Partiers: Open your eyes. Open you minds.
I am neither a Tea Party member nor a Fox watcher. I do not have cable and only three channels on my tv (one is close circuit view of the front door of my apartment).
Your comment should be ‘Walker has widespread support all across Wisconsin (and beyond) because he is fighting to return a right that was originally taken from the taxpayer in 1959: the right not to be unreasonably taxed in and forced to live worse so some public union rent seeker can get paid more and live better.
You are right about one thing, to the public unions and their supporters this is not about the state budget it is simply about making sure they can continue to rent seek with impunity. In fact, they do not care about the state budget, the tax burden of those that are living not as well as them, the fact that services will need to be cut, taxes raised to the point that the productive elements of the community, namely corporations, small business owners and the wealthy, flee to low tax jurisdiction taking the jobs they create with them. To the public unions, the lack of job opportunity means nothing to them, they have a job and nice benefits and security. They are the ‘haves’ clearly preying on the ‘have nots’.
The best slogans of the protests:
‘Stop Leeching: Start Teaching.
‘Sorry I am late to this protest; I have a job and must work for a living’
Kai
That in the mean time their rights are violated by the GOP and that as a result their chances of ever making 250K a year (or the chances of their children to reach that Walhalla) are next to nothing, is something that is beyond their grasp.
The GOP has been very succesfull in convincing people it is really the right thing to do; vote against your own interests.
Mindnumbing indeed.
You are right, I do not speak for the ‘thousands of protestors, I speak for the millions of taxpayers/voters of the state that democratically elected Mr. Walker to stand up to the public unions, a key plank of his election platform. And you are right that there is no doubt in MY mind that the voters are tired of this type of special interest and their ironically named cronies, the Democrats, trying to subvert the democratic process and the will of the voters that have had enough.
This was not a situation of the right convincing anyone to vote against their best interests, but rather a situation of beleaguered voters seeking some solace from the heavy burden of run away public union demands and seeking people that will represent them in challenging that collective greed. They have found such people yet the Democrats, in an epic fail, are working to ignore and subvert the will of the people to the benefit of their special-interest paymasters. I hope that clarifies.
Kai
The UK still has very strong labour unions, Maggie only had to deal with the unions of the miners, all the others, including the unions of the public employees, are still very much in tact and much, much more powerfull than the present-day US unions.
And yet; UK deficit is lower, UK unemployment is lower and the people in the UK have a better health care system and a better pension-plan.
Something os wrong in the state of Wisconsin (and all other 49 states).
The workers in Wisconsin stand for all of us who have been hammered down in this economy and in the decades leading up to it.
Polls also show that the majority of people are supporting the union workers.
I still don't understand why people are more incensed at middle class workers trying to maintain a middle class existence than they are about billionaire hedge fund managers.. who contribute nothing to the economy.. and CEO's who make millions by laying off workers and offshoring jobs.
Which group is the real threat to the American way of life?
You have obviously fallen for the rhetoric of the GOP. It is not a fight between people, it is a fight between individuals of the US and corporations who want to de-individualize US democracy and make that democracy into a sham.
And they will do it by stripping the individuals of all their powers, even the power to appoint a labor union to negotiate on their behalf for better payments, better health care and better pensions.
things up. Nothing like holding a cons feet to the fire.
If not, Republican budget will be big give-aways (using tax loopholes, subsidies and earmarks) to corporate interests once again; as payback for campaign contributions.
Here is a start to fiscal responsibility! We-ALL should end being patsies; with all sides having "their take" over- and under-the-table.
Eliminate the current 14 Trillion debt OVER A FIFTEEN YEAR PERIOD by:
Increase tax revenues: End loopholes, tax hedge fund income, etc and 1 cent tax on each share traded on exchanges. Revenue raised 4 Trillion dollars.
Reduce military spending by 4 Trillion dollars.
Reduce SS and Medicare spending by 2 Trillion dollars.
Reduce remainder of federal spending by 4 Trillion dollars.
No current budget deficits, so we are not adding to debt.
Shared sacrifice that all can embrace. Above solution should end posturing from all sides and endless bickering from professional politicians and paid consultants.
Please note, budget figures are 15-year goals. It approximates 10% budget reduction. Balancing budgets and paying-off debt, reduces interest on debt, which consumes more of the budget every year.
We currently have a right balance of power-sharing between two parties. Thanks to grassroots and other political momentum, country is serious about tackling budget-deficit; which adds to our fiscal burden.
Please forward to elected representatives and newspapers.