Labor: Are public-sector unions obsolete?

It’s “Big Labor’s last stand,” said David Paul Kuhn in RealClearPolitics.com. The ongoing battle in Wisconsin between Gov. Scott Walker and the state’s public labor unions is, on one level, a reflection of a nationwide struggle by governors to balance budgets still suffering from the ravages of the Great Recession. But what’s really at stake is the future of organized labor in America. If Walker succeeds in his attempt to strip public unions in Wisconsin of their power to bargain collectively for wages and benefits, it could trigger a chain reaction that would make the very term Big Labor “a vestige of a bygone era.” That would be a disaster for the nation, said Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post. “Unions are a necessary part of any functioning democracy”—the only real way to give working people some leverage in dealing with corporations and the rich. In recent years, Republican tax policy, deregulation, and globalization have turned the gap between rich and middle-class Americans into a chasm. That’s why the current “Republican war on unions” must not succeed.

Unions have their place in the private sector, said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online, but public-sector unions “must go.” Private-sector unions grew up in response to real abuses in coal mines, factories, and other harsh working environments, where workers were treated like serfs. Government workers “have no such narrative on their side.” DMV clerks, street sweepers, and teachers organized to get higher wages and juicy benefits, and with the help of the Democratic Party, have managed to “collectively bargain” themselves deals far more generous than those of equivalent workers in the private sector. It’s been a corrupt deal from the start, since unions pour members’ dues into the campaigns of Democratic politicians, who pay back the favor by giving unions fat contracts. That’s why even Democrats such as Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York are now looking to curb union power, said Walter Russell Mead in The-American-Interest.com. “State and local budgets have reached the breaking point,” and with billion-dollar deficits looming from sea to shining sea, “the old way of running government just doesn’t work.”

There’s more at stake here than budgets, said Howard Fineman in TheHuffingtonPost.com. Republicans are using budget deficits as an excuse to “dismantle public-sector unions as an electoral force.” Unions spend huge amounts of time and money campaigning for Democratic candidates, and organize formidable get-out-the-vote efforts in working-class areas and minority communities. By enfeebling the public unions, the GOP knows it could improve its political fortunes for generations to come. Meanwhile, said Ken Bernstein in CNN.com, “the American dream will be destroyed for millions.” Working people will once again be at the mercy of abusive employers, under a “government of the corporations” doing the bidding of the wealthy and the powerful.

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If unions die, said Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post, it will largely be their own fault. Look at how private unions bankrupted the U.S. auto industry, stubbornly refusing to make necessary wage and benefit concessions when the automakers’ revenues plummeted. Now government workers face the same dilemma: If they fight “too hard to protect existing wages and benefits,” the cash-strapped American public will lose all sympathy for them. If they don’t fight hard enough, they face a “revolt from angry rank-and-file members.” Either way, what we are witnessing in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states is “the death knell of Big Labor.”