Follow-up on Radicalism

I've made this challenge before:

I've challenged some Republican friends to come up with one issue on which Democrats are now further to the left than they were in 2000 other than gay rights/gay marriage. I've never heard an answer.

Last night I was with some conservative friends and I made that challenge in the course of our conversation.  For the first time I heard a kind of answer: the conservatives I was with agreed with each other that it's not exactly that the Democratic party has moved Left so much as that they have failed to acknowledge areas in which liberal dogma has been clearly proven wrong.  Their favorite example was unions- they argued that unions in the public sphere were destroying state and local government budgets, and Democrats were continuing to support them.

On one hand, this answer sort of concedes my argument that only one party is growing more radical, but at this point I don't see any other response to the point- it's just unassailable.

On the other hand, though, it's a legitimate point that begs a response so here it is:

First of all, if I conceded the point that Liberals continue to support unions in the face of all evidence, I could still point out that the Republican party is doing that in practically every area of public policy- Global Warming is accepted by pretty much every reputable science organization but is denied by conservatives.  Republicans continue to throw out tax plans claiming that lower taxes increase revenues, despite tons of evidence to the contrary.  I could go on and on.

But of course I don't concede the point that unions have outlived their usefulness.  It's not true that government workers are getting better benefits than they used to get.  It's just that workers outside of government are getting a lot less, because unions are dying out.  This is related to the "99%" issue- workers in the private sector have less power than they did 30 years ago as more industries have de-unionized, and the result has been that recent wealth gains have virtually all gone to the top 1% of our society.  So I'd frame the problem not as "too much for government workers", but rather as "not enough for private sector workers".

Now the response to that point was that "we can't be competitive" with unions in today's world, with 3rd world workers lining up to work for pennies a day.  But of course there's no competitiveness issue when it comes to government workers- we're not competing against Cambodia when it comes to paying for fire departments.

We can't afford to pay government workers because we have historically low tax rates.  There's an obvious solution to that problem.

Now it still may be true that governments have negotiated too many sweetheart deals with unions.  The solution to that problem isn't to deny workers the right to organize- it's to negotiate better deals, put up with strikes sometimes, etc- it's messy, but workers should have the right to organize in a free society.

The Connection Between OWS and Government Employee Union Busting

I was listening to a story on the radio today about the fight in Ohio over the Wisconsin-inspired anti-public union law that was passed by the legislature and led by Governor John Kasich, but which has been put on the ballot and may be repealed by voters.  It got me thinking about the connection between union-busting and income inequality.

Here's what I mean: unions protect the wages of working class and middle class people.  But unions have been on the decline for 30 years, and the only sector left in which they're truly strong is among public employees.  That's where you see working people (road crews, city bus drivers, firemen, police) and lower-pay professionals (teachers, protective service social workers, clerks in government offices) making reasonable wages, while their brethren in the private sector have been falling behind badly.

And what is the topic du jour today, in light of the Occupy Wall Street protest?  Income inequality.  We've all been hearing about the incredible pay increases among the "top 1%", but have thought less about the pay decreases (or more accurately, flat pay) of the middle class.  But this is an important issue too.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, middle class pay increased.  There were lots of good jobs in unionized industry, which probably pushed up pay in non-union shops too.  But with globalization and the departure of lots of textiles and manufacturing elsewhere, the downward pressure on blue collar labor has been intense.  Union shops just closed and the factories moved elsewhere where labor costs were cheaper.

But the result is that now the blue collar jobs that are left don't pay very well.  Our economy has moved to one domintated by the service sector, and retail and fast food industries have effectively blocked unions.  The pay at Walmart and Burger King is terrible compared to the pay at a factory 40 years ago, but that's where the jobs are now.

So Conservatives, in their bid to destroy their opponents in the union world, have turned their eyes to government sector unions.  The Ohio and Wisconsin laws don't just cut benefits, they outlaw union dues being collected from paychecks, effectively destroying the unions entirely.  Of course, there aren't enough Big Business conservatives to support such legislation, so they have to get votes from somewhere else, and they've hit upon a really smart strategy: splitting the middle class.

The voter who works at Walmart has crappy pay and crappier benefits.  He looks at the DPW worker, with similar skills, making a living wage for the government, and he's getting angry about it.  And he should be angry!!!  But the right wing machine has figured out how to get him angry at the DPW worker, instead of getting angry at Walmart.

If Liberals want to win this battle, we have to turn the anger of the middle class away from government workers and toward the elites who are leading these changes.  After all, government workers aren't getting paid any more than they ever were- the change is that private sector workers are getting paid less.  Maybe Occupy Wall Street can help lift that narrative.

Wisconsin- Republicans Win

I have to agree with Ezra Klein on this: Republicans appear to have won (assuming it was legal to vote so quickly on the bill, but in that case they could presumably just wait a few days and do it right).  They figured out a legal loophole that allows them to pass the union-busting bill without a quorum.

In my quest to be consistent on this blog and in my thinking, I want to go on record saying that Democrats did something legal, leaving town to deny the quorum, and Republicans found a way around the problem, also legally.  All's fair in love and war- and politics.  Next step is for Democrats to successfully recall a bunch of politicians in the aftermath and gain control of the state.  Not sure how realistic that is, but recalls are legal too.

My Union Solution

Here's my extended post on unions in general, spurred by the doings in Wisconsin:

Public employee unions are most of what the union movement has left.  Currently the US workforce is about 12% union, down from 20% in 1983.  Reliable statistics aren't available to me from earlier than that, but in the 1940s and 1950s union membership was certainly much higher even than it was in 1983- it's been declining since at least the 1970s.

And traditionally unions were formed by blue collar workers in the manufacturing or farm sectors, workers with little control over their work, few skills, and (at the outset of the movement) absolutely horrible working conditions.  Today these unions are gasping for air, their jobs shifted to low-wage third world countries, while public employees make up a higher percentage of the movement.

I've been talking to people who belong to unions, or have family members in unions, over the past few days, and it brings out a real dilemma.  It's tough to mount a full-throated defense of unions when one hears about all the abuses in public sector union rules.  Conservative complaints that it's nearly impossible to fire bad teachers have plenty of basis in fact.  We all drive past road work crews in the Summer and witness more standing around than working.  I read about firefighters retiring at age 50 with massive pensions to be paid in perpetuity.  Certainly union workers have more job security than I've ever had, and they're practically the only workers left who have defined pensions for which taxpayers are on the hook, rather than 401K retirement plans in which the worker has to take on all the risk.

But a little history is instructive here.  America before the union movement was not just miserable for workers.  It was really dangerous to be a factory worker.  Pay was bad, safety rules were nonexistent, child labor use was common, pensions were of course unheard of (and there was no social security to fall back on), and workers who complained were just fired.  If you were maimed on a machine, you were out of luck and out of a job.  Big Business held all the cards.  A powerful and easy read on this is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, an expose of the meat-packing industry around 1900.  There was virtually no way out for an unskilled worker before the advent of unions.

So unions grew, and supported the Democratic party for obvious reasons- the Democrats supported workers' rights to a humane environment and a living wage, while Republicans were the party of Big Business, which wanted to keep the gravy train rolling.  Workers trying to organize unions were slowed by a myriad of dirty tactics by industrialists, but over time laws were passed allowing workers to organize as they wished (the US is a free country, after all, and if people want to join together to negotiate that's certainly in concert with the American ethos).

But eventually, unions started into decline.  The center of their power was manufacturing, and with globalization manufacturing jobs moved to China, Mexico, and elsewhere where labor costs are much cheaper.  That's nobody's fault- it would have happened whether those sectors were unionized or not, because US workers certainly are not going to compete with Cambodians making five cents an hour no matter how far to the bottom we go.

The new frontier for union organizing here should be and is the service sector of the economy.  That sector is growing faster than others in the US, and retail workers don't control their conditions much more than factory workers did back in the day.  But thus far it's been quite a slog- Walmart, the biggest private employer in the US now, is notorious for its union busting tactics, including the time it illegally shut down its entire meat-cutting division rather than allow seven butchers to organize.  And it's not like you could argue that Walmart workers are better off without a union- they pay is bad, benefits worse, and management ruthless enough to make any of the Gilded Age titans proud.

But unions haven't caught on in the service sector, so the major remnants of the labor movement are left in the public sector.  And they seem to be fighting for the wrong things: teachers don't get paid very well, but it's often very difficult to fire them even when their work is awful.  Police don't have outrageous hourly rates considering the dangers they face, but make enormous sums on overtime details of questionable necessity to the public. 

And of course government workers are practically the only ones left getting pensions, even if their salaries aren't as high as are seen in the private sector, especially for more educated professionals.  But keep in mind that there's nothing outrageous about pensions per se- millions of workers had them in the US for much of the last century, and it went fine for a long time.  The problem isn't that public workers get pensions, it's that private ones don't anymore.  That's great for Wall Street, which gets a steady stream of suckers trying to invest their 401K's, but not so great for workers.

I think that the reason government workers get paid a bit less while getting better benefits is because state and local governments have been willing to make workplace concessions in order to save money or delay payments.  It's cheaper in the short run to pay less in salary in exchange for more job security, even if it's not in the interest of quality.  And in tough budget times, pension funds can always be shorted by creative government budget makers and put off until the good times.  All this is understandable, and not the fault of the unions.

So now we come down to the present day.  It's pretty clear that the Wisconsin budget problems have nothing to do with unions (as noted in my last post), but are the result of a recession and a recent tax cut.  The governor has manufactured a crisis to enact his agenda, which is to destroy the unions in his state, even if those unions are willing to make concessions. 

So what I'd like to see is for governments at all levels in the US negotiate with unions, and push to reform contracts that don't make sense.  If teachers are too hard to fire, change the rules in the next contract, and if the Teacher's Union refuses, then deal with strike threats and the like.  If we can't afford to pay firefighters the salaries we're paying, then tell them at the next contract negotiation and work to get the public on the side of the cities and towns.  Yes it's ugly, and it's going to lead to strikes, but compared to Governor Walker's solution, it still leaves workers with the power to organize themselves; in short, it allows them the freedom to associate that shouldn't be denied anyone in the United States.

Union Busting in the Modern Age

Very troubling doings in Wisconsin.  The all-GOP government there has decided to destroy public sector unions, manufacturing a budget crisis as an excuse.  In fact, the state had no budget problems at all before the recession, and recently passed a series of tax cuts on business that depressed revenue and make budget projections look much worse.  See Ezra Klein for more details

So what we have here is a budget crisis caused by a Wall Street-driven recession and exacerbated by recent tax cuts, which Republicans propose to solve by destroying public sector unions.  How do they plan to destroy the unions?  Proposed legislation would:

• Not allow unions to negotiate benefits or work rules
• Not allow them to negotiate wages beyond a certain point
• Forbid union dues deductions from paychecks
• Mandate new union votes annually

So we're not talking about weakening the unions, or about givebacks- we're talking about union-busting, pure and simple, except instead of a corporation sending in thugs to do it, now we have the government doing it by law.

And that's not even the whole thing- there's more!  The Wisconsin law exempts police and fire departments and other public safety unions.  Why might that be?  Turns out, those unions supported the governor in the election campaign.  So much for principles.  Are we trying to claim that state child protective service workers and teachers are more corrupt than cops and firemen?  Cops and firefighters had better understand that they're next.

Lots of people are really mad that unionized government workers still get defined pensions, generous health care benefits, and guarantees of safe workplaces.  There was a time when workers got that stuff in the private sector too.  But the solution isn't to screw public employees- it's to fight to get those kind of working conditions back for private sector blue collar and service workers.  I understand why Big Business doesn't want that, but for the rest of us it ought to be pretty clear.