Wisconsin Smoke Screen is Cover for Union Busting

The state of Wisconsin faces a projected budget shortfall of $3.6 billion over two years. The new Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, has proposed that the state's 175,000 state employees pay more into their retirement and health plans to solve the problem. The two-year savings for this proposal--$300,000,000--is only 8.3% of the savings needed. That is the smoke screen covering his real agenda. He has also introduced a bill into the newly Republican-majority legislature that would take away collective bargaining rights for all state workers except for police, firefighters and the state patrol. 10,000 state workers descended on the state capitol in Madison for protests today. Click here for more details.

At a time in history when rights seem to be advancing elsewhere around the world, even in such places as Sudan, Egypt and Tunisia, they are under siege in the United States. First, the 5-4 "Citizens United" Supreme Court decision overturned a century of precedent banning corporate cash in the political process and even struck down transparency requirements that allowed the public to know where such contributions were coming from. Now the other shoe is dropping, and the campaign to disable the one institution somewhat capable of opposing the pro-corporate and anti-worker agenda, workers united with the right to bargain together, has begun.

Before the New Deal Wagner Act of 1935 most workers toiled 12-hour days six days a week without benefits for starvation wages. Once the right to organize and bargain was enshrined and federally protected, America developed the largest middle class in the world and became the most broadly prosperous nation on earth.

But corporate America has never been happy with having to share a reasonable portion of profits with the help. They and their Republican partners have always looked forward to the day when such rights could be rolled back and the plutocratic days of the Gilded Age restored. If Walker and his legislators are successful, more such efforts will rapidly get under way in other states. Ohio and Tennessee are two of the first likely targets. The conservative court has opened the floodgates to corporate cash inundating the election process, to the great advantage of the Republican Party. If that party were also able to destroy the union movement, they would thereby eliminate the main countervailing funding source that supports the Democrats.

These developments are profoundly threatening to the well-being of the American people. A great deal hangs in the balance in Wisconsin over the next few days and weeks. If rights can actually be taken away from people it bodes most ill for the future prosperity and liberty of America's hard-pressed middle class. We'll see what fight still resides in the hearts of the descendants of Fighting Bob La Follette in the Cheese State.