Twinkie Offense

(Editorial cartoon by Joel Heller for the Green Bay Press-Gazette and featured at Ladysmith News.  Click on image to enlarge and then buzz on back.)

I must admit that I've been amused by all the reminiscing about Twinkies the past couple of weeks.  Oh, I've had a few in my youth, but I don't recall actually eating one in the last 45 years or so.  When I was  attending a small Mid-Western college, the English majors would gather in the school coffee shop ("The Pit"), take over several tables, and engage in "Twinkie Punching," an activity that involved buying a couple of packages of the delectable dessert, placing them in the center of the tables, and bringing our fists down on the packages to see if we could get the cream filling to escape the packages.  A juvenile activity?  Of course, but we didn't actually eat the product.

What I have not been amused by is the news reports on the demise of the Hostess Company via bankruptcy (the second in less than ten years), all of which linked the company's failure to the unions involved.  Michael Hiltzig was just as unamused as I am.  Here's some of what he had to say in his latest column.

Let's get a few things clear. Hostess didn't fail for any of the reasons you've been fed. It didn't fail because Americans demanded more healthful food than its Twinkies and Ho-Hos snack cakes. It didn't fail because its unions wanted it to die.

It failed because the people that ran it had no idea what they were doing. Every other excuse is just an attempt by the guilty to blame someone else. ...

Hostess management's efforts to blame union intransigence for the company's collapse persisted right through to the Thanksgiving eve press release announcing Hostess' liquidation, when it cited a nationwide strike by bakery workers that "crippled its operations."

That overlooks the years of union givebacks and management bad faith. Example: Just before declaring bankruptcy for the second time in eight years Jan. 11, Hostess trebled the compensation of then-Chief Executive Brian Driscoll and raised other executives' pay up to twofold. At the same time, the company was demanding lower wages from workers and stiffing employee pension funds of $8 million a month in payment obligations. ...

The company had known for a decade or more that its market was changing, but had done nothing to modernize its product line or distribution system. Its trucks were breaking down. It was keeping unprofitable stores open and having trouble figuring out how to move inventory to customers and when. It had cut back advertising and marketing to the point where it was barely communicating with customers. It had gotten hundreds of millions of dollars in concessions from its unions, and spent none of it on these essential improvements. ...

As management experts such as Peter Drucker have observed, the goal of a successful business must be to find and serve customers. Do that, and the numbers take care of themselves. The Hostess approach was entirely backward — meeting the numbers became Job One, and figuring out how to grow the business became Job None.   [Emphasis added]

In other words, the executives and owners had squeezed out just about every last dollar they could from the company and decided to shut it down, blaming the unions for the problems.  Shades of Bain! 

Hiltzig goes into greater detail with respect to the dealings with the unions and with the other shenanigans of the company's leaders, and his column is worth reading in its entirety.

It's just a shame that most of the rest of the mainstream media decided to take the easy way out and report the news based on the company's blast faxes.  As far as most Americans can tell, this is just one more case of the unions over reaching. 

And that really pisses me off.

Less Bread, Fewer Circuses

(Editorial cartoon by Lee Judge / The Kansas City Star (September 26, 2012) and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge, and then hustle on back here.)

 Michael Hiltzig has a wonderful column up on the NFL/Replacement Officials controversy consuming the sports pages since the debacle of Moday's Seattle-Green Bay Game.  By way of disclosure, I am a Packer fan and have been my entire life.  I spent the first 22 years of my life growing up in Milwaukee, so that's a natural.  I mean, what else are you going to do when the temperature is leventy-seven below zero with a wind-chill factor of a hunnert-leventy-seven below zero?  Not going to a farmer's market after church, that's for damned sure.

But as dismayed as I was by the ending of that game, I didn't actually slip into the "we-wuz-robbed" mode.  All of the NFL teams are playing with the same amateur (a kind euphemism) officials.  It was nothing personal.  It's just that the owners have locked out the professional officials and we are left with the lower levels of wannabes from such places as The Lingerie League.  Really.  And why?  The owners locked out the regulars in a contract dispute with the officials' union for, among other things, retirement benefits.  And this is where Hiltzig's column comes in.

The one thing about the National Football League on which almost everyone agrees is that it takes its job of providing first-rate entertainment very seriously.

That could be one explanation for the league's effort to supplement the pleasure of watching two teams of superbly trained athletes compete by adding the comedy stylings of pick-up referees, capped by the spectacular fiasco of Monday night's Seattle Seahawks-Green Bay Packers game.

Or the explanation may be simply that a business collecting more than $9 billion in revenue this year sees value in sacrificing one crucial component of its success — credible and firm enforcement of the rules — merely to save about $5 million a year, or five hundredths of a percent.

That's the difference in retirement contributions between what the league wants to pay its referees and what the referees have said they'd accept. And that's one of the major sticking points in the high-profile labor dispute between the NFL and its refs that has made a mockery of the league's supposed commitment to professional on-field standards and player safety.   [Emphasis added]

 It's at this point, however, that Hiltzik makes the broader and more important point:  we should be neither shocked nor surprised by the owners' move.  We've seen it happening for years, just not when it comes to the baby-pacifier, numbing-the-masses circuses:

...But it's really about much more.

It's about employers' assault on the very concept of retirement security. It's about employers' willingness to resort to strong-arm tactics with workers, because they believe that in today's environment unions can be pushed around (they're not wrong). You ignore this labor dispute at your peril, because the same treatment is waiting for you.  ...

One major issue is the NFL's insistence on changing the retirement plan for all refs from a traditional defined-benefit plan, based on the employees' pay and years of service, to a 401(k)-style defined-contribution plan. The defined-benefit plan covering existing refs would be frozen and terminated — they'd get what they've earned so far, but no more. The referees union has already agreed to the changeover for all newly hired members but proposes to grandfather the old plan for existing refs, allowing them to continue to accrue benefits.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has argued that defined-benefit plans are a thing of the past — even he doesn't have one, he told an interviewer recently, as though financially he's in the same boat as any other league employee.

This is as pure an expression as you'll find of the race to the bottom in corporate treatment of employees. Industry's shift from defined-benefit retirement plans to 401(k) plans has helped to destroy retirement security for millions of Americans by shifting pension risk from employer to employee, exposing the latter to financial market meltdowns like those that occurred in 2000 and 2008.   [Emphasis added]

This is about union-busting and putting us in our places.  We've put up with it so far, so what do the owners have to lose?  Recent history (Wisconsin and the recall election of Walker, for example) would seem to bear their gamble out.

Unless, of course, we refuse to play this time.

A Bleak Prognostication

David Lazarus had some interesting thoughts on the current state of unions and their probably future. Interesting, yes. Depressing, very.

American Airlines has spent the week trying to persuade a bankruptcy judge to allow it to chuck all its labor contracts and put the squeeze on thousands of union employees.

If things go as expected — that is, a victory for management and not for rank-and-file workers — it will be the latest blow to organized labor and yet another indication that, in the workplace of the future, most of us will be fending for ourselves. ...

"It's not the unions' fault we're in bankruptcy," [AMR lawyer, Jack Gallagher] acknowledged. "But it's not about whose fault it is. It's about the facts of our business."

You could say the demise of organized labor is about the facts of all businesses, as well as a changed political climate that, since the Reagan administration in the 1980s, has emboldened employers in standing up to unions. [Emphasis added]

I would have placed the onset of the decline a little earlier than Reagan, but his move on the Air Traffic Controllers Union was certainly an important line of demarcation in this country's labor movement.

As Lazarus points out, to some extent unions themselves share in the blame: they became complacent, lazy, and in some cases corrupt. They stopped organizing and started lobbying for power, both with Congress and within the ranks. Also, employers began wising up and extending some benefits to their workers (health care) before the unions could get a toe hold. Why pay union dues if the bosses were going to give most of what you wanted anyway? And then, of course, the economy went into the toilet so that right now most employed workers are more concerned with just keeping a paycheck coming in than in decent pay and working conditions.

With all this, Lazarus opines that unions, both public and private sector, will be gone within a generation. I'm not quite that pessimistic, but I can see his point. As part of his conclusion, Lazarus quotes one of the godfathers of the union movement:

"What can labor do for itself?" union leader Eugene V. Debs asked more than a half-century ago. "The answer is not difficult. Labor can organize, it can unify; it can consolidate its forces. This done, it can demand and command."

Yes, but it will take more than twitter and social media flash mobs. It will take the hard work of educating and organizing and mobilizing. Given the state of workers, whether employed, unemployed, and under-employed, there's no time like the present to restart the movement.

May it be so.

On The Money

Tonight President Obama unveils his jobs plan before Congress. He expects the Hill to join him on a "pivot" from the economy in general to creating jobs in particular. Both are woefully late to the program. Creating jobs and getting Americans back to work should have been at the top of the list of priorities, not the bottom, but our elected officials felt that the banks and Wall Street were much more important than the rest of us. Apparently they've discovered that there ain't any such animal as a jobless recovery in the planet's book of species. Finally.

The shift, coming as it does the week of Labor Day is somewhat fortuitous, but mostly just coincidental, I fear. Labor just isn't as interesting to our owners as it should be. And that certainly is not a new phenomenon, as an excellent column written by Tom Eblen for the Lexington Herald-Leader and featured at McClatchy DC points out. That attitude has resulted in the downward slippage of those of us who work (as opposed to those who own). Mr. Eblen points out that paralleling the decline of the Middle Class has been the decline of unions and the increase in union bashing.

Economic and political forces have hammered working people. Real income for the bottom 80 percent of Americans has been stagnant or falling since the late 1970s. Few paid much attention until the 2008 financial crisis, because the trends were masked by rising personal and government debt.

During these years of middle-class decline, it has been fashionable to bash labor unions. Perhaps that is because people take for granted the things unions fought to make part of the American workplace — the eight-hour work day, overtime pay, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance and safe working conditions. Unions led the fight to end child labor and discrimination against minorities and women. They played a big role in creating Social Security and other government safety-net programs. ...

Unions have plenty of flaws; all institutions do. But they serve an important role in balancing the power of business. Power without balance becomes abusive. We have seen that with business, labor, government and even churches. It is no coincidence that the decline of middle-class income and security over the past three decades has followed the declining influence of organized labor. [Emphasis added]

And the union bashing has picked up steam even as the unemployment figures continue to be dismal. Newly elected governors in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan have explicitly targeted public sector unions, aiming to remove even the most minimal of protections fought for in contracts. And no one in government at any level has cried out against the abuses that have ensued. Eblen addresses that factor as well:

The deep economic hole that politicians are debating how to fill was caused mostly by financial speculation, unfunded wars of choice and irresponsible tax cuts. But you hear little talk in Washington about a crackdown on Wall Street, real tax reform or scaling back military adventurism.

That is because wealthy interests have largely taken over both political parties. Democrats still give lip service to the middle class and poor, but the GOP has become a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America.

Amen.

Until working people figure out the scam, we're doomed to nothing more than the crumbs from our owners' table, and then only if we show we're suitably grateful. What has worked in the past, banding together so that our power is magnified, will work again, but only if we actually band together. We need to reach that point again, and soon.

Very soon.

At Glacial Speed

The Los Angeles Times carried a report yesterday on a Gallup poll which seems to indicate that the American public is waking up a little.

More Americans back public employee unions than governors seeking to balance strained budgets by demanding givebacks, including a curb on bargaining rights, according to a Gallup poll released Friday.

The poll, which showed that 48% agree with public employee unions compared with 39% who back the governors, marks somewhat of a leveling of the political playing field on an issue that the GOP has pushed, most noticeably in the Midwest. The issue has also played well into the overall national Republican posture of being fiscally conservative and pro-business.

The numbers aren't staggering, but it does show a shift in opinions which, if it continues to hold, may mean trouble for those Republican governors who sailed into office promising parsimonious budgets balanced on the backs of working people. The governor of Wisconsin faces the loss of the Republican majority in the state senate via current recall efforts, and may himself face recall next January.

The news out of Wisconsin is that recall workers have reported enough signatures in one district to hold a recall election and did so 30 days earlier than the time allotted. Other recall efforts in the state report encouraging results in their drives as well. As a result of those efforts, even the brash Majority Leader of the state senate admits that if the vote on Gov. Walker's bill to effectively root out state employee unions were held today it would not have the votes to pass.

This is good news for working people, and speaking of "news", the Gallup Poll had something to say about that as well:

The poll also found that 28% of Americans said they followed the news about the union battles closely and 32% said they followed it somewhat closely. That represents a typical response to a major news story, according to Gallup.

Again, the numbers aren't staggering, but it does show what happens when the press does its job: people are moved.

I am guardedly optimistic on both aspects.

Waking Up

Selecting an article from Watching America was easy this week, but that's probably because this opinion piece from Argentina's Argenpress matched my own interests right now. It's about the whole push to bust unions by Republican governors in our Midwest. It's also about the potential re-engergizing of the union movement in this country.

The Wisconsin battle has generated an extraordinary movement of solidarity and worker mobilization throughout the country with meetings, supportive actions, and fundraising to support the occupants of the Capitol extending to all regions. The issue of defense of collective bargaining and the right to organize workers has become part of the national debate. It’s not just solidarity: In Ohio, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets against the cutback plan pushed by that state’s governor, which proposed elimination of collective bargaining for public employees and allowing hiring of new workers (scabs) during an eventual stoppage. There are also mobilizations in Indiana, where bills were presented that included a plan that would authorize private sector workers to “choose” not to be in any union. On Saturday Feb. 26, worker demonstrations were held throughout the United States in solidarity with the fight in Wisconsin: In Madison, in spite of snow, 70,000 people united for the most important demonstration since the Vietnam War. There were also tens of thousands in every principal city in the country. The massiveness of the demonstration on the 26th gave new life to the storming of Madison’s Capitol: On Sunday the 27th the government’s attempt to clear the building failed when hundreds of state police officers declared support for the occupiers. The occupation continues stronger than ever.

In the United States the conscience of millions of workers is undergoing a transformation. The New York Times concluded that Wisconsin might be the “Tunisia of the United States’ working class.” It’s like one of the demonstrators on the 26th stated in his slogan, “Thank you, Governor Walker, for waking a sleeping giant — the American working class.”

While I'm not too sure the numbers cited by the author are accurate when it comes to the masses of protesters, I suspect they are closer to the truth than the ones given out by authorities and the US mainstream media. That said, I believe he's gotten the rest of the story correct. The working class is finally beginning to get it when it comes to what our owners have in mind for us.

We may have lost the first skirmish as the Republican state senators found a way to work around the missing Democrats, but the war continues. Yesterday another 100,000 (at least) protesters renewed the battle at the Madison Capitol, this time joined by the Democratic senators who have returned to the state.

And the unions and their supporters have found other ways to engage, including pouring energy into the effort to recall 8 Republican senators and pulling money from a bank whose directors contributed to Scott Walker's election campaign.

The battle is a crucial one for the nation, not just Wisconsin. If that sleeping giant awakens and stands up for the rights of working people, we will have our own revolution.

Elections Have Consequences

The Republicans in Wisconsin won this round. Members of the Senate did an end around the Democrats who had fled to Illinois to prevent the necessary quorum for voting on the budget bill designed to bust state employee unions.

The Republicans control the Senate but had been blocked from voting on the issue after Senate Democrats left the state last month to prevent a quorum. But the Republicans used a procedural maneuver Wednesday to force the collective bargaining measure through: they removed elements of Governor Walker’s bill that were technically related to appropriating funds, thus lifting a requirement that 20 senators be present for a vote. In the end, the Senate’s 19 Republicans approved the measure, 18 to 1, without any debate on the floor or a single Democrat in the room.

Nice move. And it will work. The State Assembly, also heavily Republican, will surely pass the changed bill. The public will now be faced with a strutting Scott Walker, the governor who wanted desperately to kill collective bargaining and got what he wanted.

Is the battle over?

Not hardly. State progressives will continue working furiously on the recall of several Republican senators and might very well succeed. In ten months, the possibility of a recall of the governor will rise on the horizon. In the mean time, union supporters will hopefully continue to apply pressure on the state legislature via ongoing peaceful protests.

But it's a battle that wouldn't have had to be fought if the state's voters hadn't elected Scott Walker and his Republican buddies. And there's the lesson. The Republicans "swept" into office in an election for which there was a dismal turnout. Too many people stayed home in November, especially in the big cities, the bastion of progressive politics.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons/excuses for that low turnout, not the least of which would be the total disgust of voters with the Democratic Party on the national level. Jobless, about to be homeless, with the economy in the toilet, Wisconsin Democrats watched as Wall Street and the wealthy got bailed out by Democrats who held the White House and controlled Congress and all they got was the equivalent of a tee shirt in payroll tax breaks. So, unlike November, 2008, the Wisconsin voter just stayed home.

And they got, sadly, what they deserved: Scott Walker and a Republican-led state legislature bankrolled by the Koch Brothers.

State and local elections may not have the cachet or drama of a presidential election, but they are just as important. In many respects, they are even more important for sending a message to national officials and party leaders, but at the very least those elections are necessary for the nitty-gritty work required to keep cities functioning and the state healthy. Those who stayed home in Milwaukee, Green Bay, Madison did their state a disservice.

Elections have consequences.

Eye Those Wheaties Carefully, Governor Walker ...

...the New York Times just peed in your cereal bowl.



OK. I admit it. I was stunned by this from the New York Times. It's the poll which the Grey Lady conducted on the issue of public employees and their unions. (The poll results are located here.) I guess most Americans do care about unions and about their public employees.

Americans oppose weakening the bargaining rights of public employee unions by a margin of nearly two to one: 60 percent to 33 percent. While a slim majority of Republicans favored taking away some bargaining rights, they were outnumbered by large majorities of Democrats and independents who said they opposed weakening them.

Those surveyed said they opposed, 56 percent to 37 percent, cutting the pay or benefits of public employees to reduce deficits, breaking down along similar party lines. A majority of respondents who have no union members living in their households opposed both cuts in pay or benefits and taking away the collective bargaining rights of public employees.

Governors in both parties have been making the case that public workers are either overpaid or have overly generous health and pension benefits. But 61 percent of those polled — including just over half of Republicans — said they thought the salaries and benefits of most public employees were either “about right” or “too low” for the work they do. ...

The poll found that an overwhelming 71 percent of Democrats opposed weakening collective bargaining rights. But there was also strong opposition from independents: 62 percent of them said they opposed taking bargaining rights away from public employee unions.

What this means is that it isn't just the dirty fucking hippies and the Islamofascist commies who care about workers, their rights, and their benefits. It also means that a huge chunk of the country does recall what unions have meant to this country and to the world.

But wait. There's more:

Tax increases were not as unpopular among those surveyed as they are among many governors, who have vowed to avoid them. Asked how they would choose to reduce their state’s deficits, those polled preferred tax increases over benefit cuts for state workers by nearly two to one. Given a list of options to reduce the deficit, 40 percent said they would increase taxes, 22 percent chose decreasing the benefits of public employees, 20 percent said they would cut financing for roads and 3 percent said they would cut financing for education.

Now, if there were just a way to channel those opinions into action ...

Steve Gets It

Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez understands the importance of unions, especially in his life. Because his father was a union man, Steve was able to go college. His father earned a decent living and could put away the money so that his child could get the education he never had. Steve Lopez considered his personal history after being offered an honorary doctorate by the public university he attended, and concluded that his life was enriched because his father always earned a fair wage by being a union member.

Now this might come as a shock to some of Steve's readers because he's had some harsh things to say about the Los Angeles Teachers Union (UTLA). He feels justified in doing so because he feels some of their contracts have been outrageous, especially when it comes pension benefits which become available to teachers at age 59. But, he asserts, he most assuredly is not anti-union. In fact, he implies that the only thing standing between workers and complete disaster is the union model, especially in these times.

I think we need to bring public employee unions and pensions into line with economic reality, as I've written many times. But we don't have to make them extinct. Shouldn't there be one last place to make a middle-class living with decent benefits and none of the risks posed by 401(k)s that are tied to shaky markets?

As my colleague George Skelton brilliantly pointed out last week (he's a San Jose State alum, naturally), inflation-adjusted incomes for the top 10% of Californians have gone up 43% in the last 20 years and 81% for the wealthiest 1%.

Income for the lower 60%, meanwhile, dropped by 12%.

Unions aren't responsible for that consolidation of wealth. If anything, the fact that the rich are getting richer is an argument to organize against the disparity. And to quit dismantling institutions like the state university system that has balanced the playing field for low-income and middle-class students by the millions over the decades.

And as to that honorary doctorate from San Jose State?

I think I'm going to accept.

And in my speech, I'm going to say that I grew up at a time when upward mobility was a realistic objective in California rather than a wild dream.

With no college education of their own, my parents were able, through hard work -- and fair pay for that work -- to take me to the doctor when I was sick, to enroll me in public schools that were adequately funded instead of at the bottom of the national rankings, and to send me to a proud state university system that has prepared great battalions of students for what was once a thriving economy. [Emphasis added]

Well said, Steve. I wish I could be there to hear you deliver that speech.

Organizing An Organization

Although I found the right article at Watching America, I could just as easily have got directly to the UK's Guardian, which I frequently do. Still, this article from the "Comment Is Free" column popped right up, and the timing was perfect.

David Karpf wrote the column before yesterday's amazing nationwide rallies, including the big one in Madison (75,000 people at least). I don't think that after seeing the tremendous outpouring of support for the Wisconsin struggle against that state's governor and his union busting drive Mr. Karpf would have changed his essay in the least, nor should he have. His point is even more well-taken.

Like the protests in Cairo, the protests in Madison have depended to a large extent on the internet for messaging, logistics, and overall news. It's worked so far: as many people showed up in Madison as generally attend a football game, which in this country is a very big deal. But in the long run, that probably won't be enough.

But, just as the Egyptian protests were aided by social media, rather than caused by social media, the roots of this fight are really quite different.

Labour unions offer a bedrock structure for large-scale collective action. Governor Walker is attempting to remove that structure. If he succeeds, internet-mediated organisations won't be able to fill in the gap. Groups like MoveOn.org can be tremendously effective, particularly in the new media environment. But they can't organise workers in a specific industry or city to improve wages, working conditions and benefits. MoveOn is never going to sit across from management at the negotiating table.

That's where "organising without organisations" reaches its limits: you need to build institutions of power if you're going to confront institutions of power. When the going gets phenomenally difficult, you need courage and commitment to succeed, not just a wifi hotspot.

And that is why this struggle on behalf of the unions is so crucial. That institution has to be protected especially at a time when those who have 99% of the wealth of this country are buying politicians so that they can get that last 1%.

The current outpouring of people power is just the first step. Now unions have to tap that people power for the next battle, whether it is at the voting booth or the streets. More effort needs to be expended in educating the public about unions and why they are so important. More effort needs to be expended in increasing union membership. Less effort needs to be expended on wining and dining the politicians who have allowed the inequities and iniquities to increase.

Move On will turn the people out for you, but only if there is a good reason to do so.

The Grand Strategy

On occasion, the Los Angeles Times amazes me by publishing something that examines an issue with acumen, and then actually comes to what I consider the right conclusion. Today was was one of those days.

In an analysis piece by-lined by Mark Z. Barabak, LAT looks at the fight over public employees' rights to union representation going on in several Midwestern states and finds the real basis for the struggle.

The labor fight blazing in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals is more than a feud over budgets or the rights of government employees. It is a battle that could fundamentally change the practice of politics in this country, with enormous consequences in 2012 and beyond.

By striking at organized labor, a pugnacious group of Republican governors is hitting at the heart of the Democratic Party, which banks heavily on union money and manpower. That explains the resistance from the White House, Democrats in Congress and, most fiercely, their liberal allies from New York to California.

Once the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United granting First Amendment rights to corporations and unions with respect to campaign donations, the Republicans have been scurrying to find ways to cut out the union half of the decision. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to figure out ways to accomplish this.

"It's very simple. Wealthy individuals and corporations can still give six-, seven-, eight-figure checks to all the candidates, state parties and causes they want to," said Michael Fraioli, a Democratic strategist who works closely with organized labor. "If you take away unions and their ability to organize … you cut at the heart of our financial support."

And the timing was perfect. State budgets have been drenched in red ink because of the economic freefall of 2008. Private sector jobs have dried up and continue shrinking. Tax revenues are way down, yet ongoing costs continue to rise. One sizable chunk of those expenses go to salaries, healthcare and pension benefits for state employees. That makes them an easy target, especially since many of their counterparts in the private sector find themselves without any of those benefits.

And it is no accident that the fight has broken out in states like Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio.

No region of the country has suffered a more devastating loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs or private-sector union positions, which makes the ranks of unionized government employees — with their job security, healthcare and guaranteed pensions — a source of resentment.

The irony, of course, is that those high-paying manufacturing jobs have been lost for the most part by corporate decisions to outsource those jobs to other countries to maximize profits. Government employees didn't cause the problem, but because they weren't directly affected (until at least now), they are resented.

Also ironically, the government employee unions in Wisconsin have already indicated a willingness to return to the bargaining table on the issue of benefits and to accept reductions in all three categories. If budgetary considerations were the real issue, Governor Walker would have accepted the unions' offer, but that wasn't and isn't what this is all about.

The real fight is to destroy unions, all of them. That would give our owners a clear field in 2012 and forever after. Unless, of course, the rest of us beat this whole notion back to the Stone Age, which is where it belongs.

The Sound Of One Shoe Dropping

I've long been mystified at the passivity of the middle class as a great deal of their safety net has been shredded. Lost jobs, lost homes, lost pensions: nothing seemed to penetrate their consciousness. Well, that passivity just might be ending, at least in one unlikely place -- Wisconsin.

The new Republican governor of that state, Scott Walker, demanded a bill that would end collective bargaining rights for most public employees (he exempted police, fire fighters, and state troopers). The rationale given by Walker was that healthcare and pension costs were killing state and local budgets. As the state legislature, now controlled by Republicans, met to do the governor's bidding, a goodly amount of hell broke loose in the state's capital, Madison. Union members and their supporters converged on the city. More than 20,000 protesters showed up on Thursday, with a promise of even more due to arrive on Friday. At the same time, 14 key players left the city and the state.

The biggest crowds of the week squeezed into the Capitol on Thursday, shouting down the state Senate president as he tried to start the session. Thousands more gathered outside, their cries echoing off the building's stone walls well into Thursday night. During the day, 15 school districts in the state closed because teachers were at the protests.

Before the expected vote on Walker's proposal, all 14 Democratic senators fled, leaving Republicans one senator short of a quorum. The Senate adjourned without debating the bill.

What is so amazing about the protest, which included not only the affected unions but also sympathizers from unions not affected (many from the private sector), is that a goodly number of the participants in all likelihood actually voted for Walker and the Republicans in the state legislature. It hadn't dawned on them that they were as likely a target for getting screwed as their poorer and darker skinned neighbors. When that realization was forced on them, they finally got the message and then got angry.

If the governor's proposal was really about cutting costs, he would have done what Arnold Schwarzenegger did in California. He would have called each of the unions into his office and negotiated contracts which reduced pension and other benefit costs for new hires. But that apparently isn't Governor Walker's style. He ruled out negotiating with unions right from the start. That's when it became clear that his real intention was to bust unions, especially those representing state workers.

That was obvious to anyone with a brain:

...observers said Walker's proposals went beyond immediate cost savings.

"What's going on in Wisconsin is not simply an attempt to adjust the benefits or co-pays or health plans," said Theda Skocpol, a political science professor at Harvard University. "It's an attempt to bust the unions."


Even President "No Drama" Obama recognized the M.O.:

"Some of what I've heard coming out of Wisconsin, where you're just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain, generally seems like more of an assault on unions," Obama said. "And I think it's very important for us to understand that public employees, they're our neighbors, they're our friends."

And that's what enraged the hardhats and teachers, the cops and fire fighters, the clerks at the DMV and the truck drivers. This wasn't about saving money. It was about denying them, the middle class, of a pretty basic right.

Welcome to our world, the one in which the sky is blue.

Now, to my friends and relatives in Wisconsin: keep at it. Don't give up. Your cause is just. Don't retreat. Keep showing up and exercising another pretty basic right, one that the Constitution guarantees. You are carrying the banner for all of us.

Because They Can

The past couple of years we have seen unions pressured to "giveback" benefits and wage scales so that employers could avoid going under. Big corporate losses have had to be trimmed and the usual targets have been not the CEOs with their generous pay schemes, but the line workers who do the actual producing. One company, however, one that is profitable, has decided to take the same approach with their unions. The Mott’s apple juice plant in Williamson, New York wants union concessions on pay and benefits from the union for a very unusual reason: the union did its job in representing its members.

The union movement and many outsiders view the strike as a high-stakes confrontation between a company that wants to cut its labor costs, even as it is earning record profits, and workers who are determined to resist demands for wage and benefit givebacks. ...

The company that owns Mott’s, the beverage conglomerate Dr Pepper Snapple Group, counters that the Mott’s workers are overpaid compared with other production workers in the Rochester area, where blue-collar unemployment is high after years of layoffs at employers like Xerox and Kodak.

Chris Barnes, a company spokesman, said Dr Pepper Snapple was seeking a $1.50-an-hour wage cut, a pension freeze and other concessions to bring the plant’s costs in line with “local and industry standards.” [Emphasis added]

Got that?

Because unemployment in the region is high, wages are lower, so the union should back off and accept comparable wages. Or something.

Another strange Tea Party, yes?

"Clean cups! Clean cups!"

I swear I am going to take to my bed.

Another Boot Drops

It's been a rough year and a half for workers. Unemployment figures continue at double digits and each week more are added to the list. That means, among other things, that employers have an additional bit of leverage when it comes to their employees and at least some of them have taken full advantage. The latest bit of evidence of that came in an article in the L.A. Times dealing with the borax mine in Boron, California. Boron is a small town in Kern County about fifty miles or so from the Mojave Desert and has essentially been a company town since borax was discovered there about 70 years ago.

The mine, the second largest open mine in the U.S., was initially owned by U.S. Borax, the company which is famous for the "Twenty Mule Team" logo of the '50's and 60's. It has since been acquired by Rio Tinto, an international corporation now "based" in London but which is actually an Australian mining company, one of the biggest in the world. Apparently that corporation isn't happy with their profits, so they've engaged in a little "proactive" response during the latest contract negotiations with the union which represents the workers.

...Citing a 25% loss in its share of the global market, mining company Rio Tinto has spent the last five months trying and mostly failing to extract concessions from the union, including changes in the cherished seniority system.

The company now has threatened to lock out its roughly 600 hourly employees and bus in replacements as early as this morning.

Workers say it's all a thinly veiled attempt to break the union. ...

Rio Tinto employs some 720 people in Boron, paying $12 to $35 an hour. The London-based mining giant operates on five continents and reported $2.5 billion in net earnings for the first half of 2009, down 65% from the same period in 2008. [Emphasis added]

The company showed a multi-billion dollar profit during the opening of an extremely rough period in the world economy, but it wasn't big enough, so the company expected the workers to give back some hard won concessions. While the article published later in the day than the one I saw this morning doesn't detail just what is involved, this morning's facts included not just seniority issues, but the right to hire non-union employees and to pay them less (thereby creating a two-tier system), to downgrade health care benefits so that only 80% is covered by the company, and to lower wage increases.

If the union doesn't play ball on this, the company will lock the workers out and bus in scabs. Those scabs won't be hard to find, not when unemployment in California is over 12%, and who can blame them too much? They're unemployed, have families and mortgages, and need a job. And a small town in Kern County, California will die, because what has sustained it for decades has decided that the coupon-cutters are more important than anything else in the world.

And that's what unfettered and unregulated capitalism is all about.

May God forgive those who believe that is the way of the world, because I certainly cannot.