Political Director's Report
John Woods, Political Director
Wisconsin is Ground Zero
Most eyes are now focused on Wisconsin where the anti-union Governor, Scott Walker, has made his state a battleground in the new war on workers. The Governor is trying to justify his demand to destroy unions by pointing to the state budget deficit. But the real cause of budget deficits is the recession brought on by the greed and deregulation of Wall Street.
Another reason for budget deficits is that anti-union politicians have been cutting taxes for 30 years. Those tax cuts mainly benefit corporations and the super-rich, which ends up making the rich a lot richer while bankrupting our government in the process. Working class families have been losing ground for 30 years - suffering a decline in real wages that makes the tax base of our communities much weaker. Combine that with the handful at the top who are taking a lot more - while paying less taxes - and you begin to see why we've racked-up these huge budget deficits.
Finally, remember that two years of recession have hammered tax revenues and pension fund investments. Once again, the blame lies with the big banks and their political friends in Washington who allowed Wall Street to run wild at taxpayer expense. We are now paying the price with record numbers of bankruptcies, foreclosures, repossessions, and double-digit unemployment.
Budget deficits are being used as an excuse to attack unions. But the worst is yet to come, because now the same politicians who allowed and bailed out Wall Street are using the crisis they created to come after unions. With only 7% of the working class in a private-sector union today, wealthy donors and their antiunion politicians and figure it's time to go after the relatively larger and stronger public unions.
The battle in Wisconsin and other states may come down to a simple question: who will win the loyalty of working class and middle income voters? Will we be able to win over workers - many who once belonged to unions - but have since seen their pay, benefits, and job security go down? Or will right-wing politicians succeed in pinning the blame for deficits on union members and convince working class voters that unions are the problem?
The loyalty of the working class is now up for grabs with the outcome hard to predict.
Governor Walker has reason to be confident after just winning an election with support from working class voters - and he's got a majority of like-minded, anti-union legislators in the State House, which means he's holding some pretty strong cards.
But union members are fighting back. One hundred thousand supporters came to Madison on February 26th, and support rallies were held in more than a dozen cities on the same day. We had rallies in support of the workers all over the state and the stakes in this fight couldn't be higher, as it may determine whether the labor movement continues to shrink or survives long enough to organize and grow in the future. There's some reason to be hopeful, because it appears that Governor Walker has failed to convince a majority of working families to support his agenda of destroying public sector unions.
And while we're focused - as we should be - on Wisconsin, it has to be said that union members are facing trouble in all 50 states as well as in Congress. There are 21 other states besides Wisconsin where anti-union Governors and state legislatures hold power. Plans are already rolling in Ohio, Indiana and New Jersey to follow Governor Walker's attack in Wisconsin. Right now, they're watching and waiting to see what happens. The outcome in Wisconsin will either make them more bold or more cautious.
Things in Congress aren't any better, with an anti-union majority controlling the U.S. House of Representatives that's attacking anything that could possibly help workers and unions such as OSHA protections and NLRB funding.
Remembering PATCO and learning from the past
We can't afford to have another situation like the PATCO strike (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) that we had in 1981 when President Reagan replaced striking air controllers with non-union scabs. That incident made it more acceptable for companies to replace strikers with scabs, encouraging employers to hire scabs - while increasing the fear among workers that they could be easily replaced in a strike. If Wisconsin isn't going to mark another decline in the state of America's labor unions, we'll need to change some of ways that unions do things. With that in mind, what are some of the lessons we can learn so far from the Wisconsin experience?
We have to win public support. We need to be smart about the way that we fight back, and that means winning support from the 90% of working class families who no longer have a union. We can't win by making this a fight about our unions, our pensions, our pay, and our health benefits. This needs to be a much broader fight that's about defending the working class, good jobs, and middle-income America - not just unions.
The anti-union winds are blowing pretty strong. So if we want more politicians to stand with us, then we'll need to rally a lot more troops to our side, speak up more loudly, and take nothing for granted.
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