Tag: Public Employee Unions

Everybody’s Scratching Somebody’s Back

Some of the mes­sage com­ing from var­i­ous Repub­li­cans late­ly is that the pub­lic employ­ee unions give the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty an edge since the Democ­rats are sup­pos­ed­ly hap­py to give the unions what­ev­er they want and then the unions pro­vide the dol­lars and the votes to elect the Democ­rats. A fine cir­cle of back scratching.

In the first place, if this was such an effec­tive dynam­ic, how did a Repub­li­can get elect­ed to the Wis­con­sin gov­er­nor­ship? Why are there any Repub­li­can office hold­ers any­where? And, why is it that

over the last fif­teen years the pay of pub­lic-sec­tor work­ers, includ­ing teach­ers, has dropped rel­a­tive to pri­vate-sec­tor employ­ees with the same lev­el of edu­ca­tion — even includ­ing health and retire­ment benefits.

(Yes, I just used that a cou­ple of posts previously…)

I sup­pose it is all hunky dory that big busi­ness and the wealthy give loads of cash to Repub­li­cans who vote to give them tax deduc­tions and tax cuts, and to ease the reg­u­la­to­ry bur­den. It is so much eas­i­er to make mon­ey when one is free to pol­lute the envi­ron­ment, treat employ­ees as expend­able assets, and cus­tomers as peo­ple to swindle.


The Class War

What? Amer­i­ca is a class­less soci­ety? Ide­al­ly, yes. In real­i­ty, no.

Sure, in Amer­i­ca any­one is able to climb the social class lad­der through hard work, ini­tia­tive, etc., etc. But this is not as true as some would have you believe.

Gen­er­al­ly, the rich get rich­er and the poor get poor­er. The lat­est reces­sion is telling. Lots of bailouts for the wealthy who are today again receiv­ing their cus­tom­ary fat bonus checks. How are you doing?

The Repub­li­cans take the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and, under the guise of bal­anc­ing the bud­get, attempt to slash spend­ing that ben­e­fits the low­er and mid­dle income pop­u­la­tion. Spend­ing stim­u­lus bills are now ver­boten (though tax cuts, espe­cial­ly for the wealthy, are always wel­come), so the states can­not receive any extra sup­port to bal­ance their bud­gets from the feds.

The Repub­li­cans in the states use the (sup­posed) state bud­get crises to destroy pub­lic employ­ee unions. Despite the fact that

over the last fif­teen years the pay of pub­lic-sec­tor work­ers, includ­ing teach­ers, has dropped rel­a­tive to pri­vate-sec­tor employ­ees with the same lev­el of edu­ca­tion — even includ­ing health and retire­ment benefits.

I do not have the num­bers, but I would bet that the pri­vate sec­tor employ­ees have not exact­ly done all that great over the past fif­teen years. Based on the Win­ners Take All graphs (scroll down just a bit) at Moth­er Jones, it does­n’t look too good.

James Taran­to opines at The Wall Street Journal:

Actu­al mid­dle-class Amer­i­cans don’t feel put upon by “cor­po­rate pow­er” or “the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty,” because by and large, they own the means of pro­duc­tion: They run busi­ness­es; they hold shares in cor­po­ra­tions through their invest­ment and retire­ment accounts.

I would love to see the polling on that.

I actu­al­ly qual­i­fy as some­one who holds shares in cor­po­ra­tions through a retire­ment account. Odd­ly, I do find myself put upon by cor­po­rate pow­er. My expe­ri­ence is that big busi­ness will screw me over every chance it gets.

But I digress. Mem­ber­ship in unions has dropped a lot over the past few decades. In 1977 26.9% of non-agri­cul­tur­al work­ers were cov­ered by a col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ment. In 2009, this num­ber is 13.7%.

And over the past few decades, inequal­i­ty has increased. Note that the share of income after tax­es has declined for the bot­tom 80%.

Yes, the rich have done very well for them­selves over the past few decades. But it is not enough it would seem. Class war has been declared by the 20% against the 80%. It is a sad fact that many of the 80% are sup­port­ing the 20% in the war.