Many of you have asked why I haven’t commented on the recent fight between labor unions and the Republican-controlled government in the state of Wisconsin. Well, it’s because I found the whole thing an anticlimactic farce.
In a nutshell, the fight was over a bill Republican Governor Scott Walker was championing that was designed to strip public employees of all collective bargaining rights except pay – and this would be indexed to inflation thereby limiting their bargaining power in this respect as well.
Of course, workers spent much of the last 100 years collectively bargaining for such basic rights as fair wages, reasonable working hours, unemployment benefit and health benefits. In fact, in 1911 Wisconsin became the first state to pass workers compensation protections.
Republicans insisted that the bill was necessary to balance the state budget and control government spending. Democrats charged that it was just a venal ploy by Republicans to reward the fat cats who funded their campaigns. (Governor Scott Walker gave credence to this charge when he was secretly recorded saying as much to someone he thought was major Republican donor David Koch but who in fact was a reporter posing as Koch.)
However, as I observed this fight unfold – complete with thousands of union workers occupying the state Capitol and 14 Democratic members of the legislature fleeing the state (on February 17) to deny Republicans of the quorum needed to vote on the bill – my only thought was that elections have consequences. In this case, after a few weeks of stalemate, the Republicans deployed a parliamentary maneuver to pass the bill, which the governor duly signed on Friday.
More to the point, it’s no more surprising to me that Republican Governor Scott Walker and his Republican legislature made this move to bust the unions than it was that Democratic President Barack Obama and his Democratic Congress made their move to pass healthcare reform.
Yet you’d be surprised at the number of union workers who actually voted not just for Walker, but also for the Republican legislature that passed this bill. They are the poor white fools who – because they aspire to be rich someday – vote like rich people today. And they take self-destructive pride in their oxymoronic designation as “Reagan Democrats.”
Lord knows there’s precious little difference between Republicans and Democrats these days. Not least because of the success former President Bill Clinton had with his triangulation scheme of putting a Democratic label on Republican policies (like welfare reform, which amounted to little more than transferring welfare benefits from poor people to rich corporations). But I digress.
But if anything distinguishes Republicans from Democrats, it’s the unabashed way Republicans enact laws that favor the rich at the expense of the poor. And this came into stark relief a few months ago when Republicans insisted that the only way Democrats would be able to extend unemployment benefits for the very poor is if they first agreed to extend Bush era tax-cuts for the very rich.
So I don’t blame Republicans in Wisconsin, or those in other states with similar union-busting bills pending, for serving the economic interests of those who fund their campaigns.
Frankly, I hope this serves as a wake-up call not just for those Reagan Democrats, but for all poor whites who believe it’s better to vote for a Republican Party that sees diversity as a national menace than for a Democratic Party that promotes diversity as a national strength.
Because the only lesson to be learned from this Wisconsin fight is that, if you value all of the worker’s (and even many of the social) rights we take for granted, then henceforth you’d better vote Democrat as if your livelihood depended on it.