Hello Forward Lookout readers. I’m Andrew, a friend of Lukas and a fellow Madison-based activist. I also write. Nice to e-meet you all.
If you took the temperature of Wisconsin politics with the opinion pages of Madison’s major dailies the Wisconsin State Journal and the Capital Times this past weekend, you might have gotten the impression that Wisconsin’s labor revolt is either fictional or a mere nuisance. Twin columns from George Lightbourn of the conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and Bill Balgord, a Middleton-based writer and consultant, do their best to either ignore or belittle the nascent anti-austerity movement and the upcoming recall elections in Wisconsin.
Balgord takes the position that not only is the resistance wrong, it’s also futile:
Having lost the legislative round, the unions subsequently initiated recall campaigns aimed at tilting the senate majority back to the Democrats. But even if that effort succeeds, it would not roll back changes to collective bargaining already going into effect.
To win legislatively, unions would need to prevail a second time by recalling Walker in 2012. By then budgetary reforms should begin to make Wisconsin’s business climate more favorable to companies looking to expand operations and brighten the prospects for many thousands among the state’s unemployed.
Little comfort to those unemployed now and living through the jobless recovery. GDP is growing, corporate profits and finance are booming thanks to a generous bailout from taxpayers, tax rates are at historic lows with many corporations doing their best to avoid taxation altogether, yet unemployment remains high. What more do the people who own the country want before they throw the rest of us a bone?
While Balgord takes the elitist high-ground by poo-pooing not just these recalls, but the idea of a recall for strictly political reasons altogether, Lightbourn’s piece simply ignores the rising tide and arrogantly proclaims that Walker has already succeeded in establishing a “new normal” for Wisconsin, a “new normal” in which unions are considered an “expensive and duplicative protection” rather than an essential advocate for workers.
But workers pay has been stagnant for decades, through boom and bust, and Wisconsin is one of the worst offenders. Lightbourn and Balgord disingenuously argue that the cuts are a bitter pill public workers must take in the name of some future, unspecified prosperity that has yet to materialize from decades of private sector union decline. The story of the diverging fortunes of the richest Americans and everyone else is the story of decreasing rates of unionization in the private sector. Without union protection, public workers can expect a similar fate.
Neither column mentions that the ability of unions to bargain doesn’t cost the state a cent, or that the unions agreed to benefit cuts without a fight. The clear lesson for the labor movement is that conceding to those cuts up front was foolhardy. The concessions couldn’t even draw damnation-with-faint-praise from conservative columnists, much less persuade any wavering Republican senators to defect and put the brakes on Walker’s union busting. They gleefully accepted their free lunch and pressed their attack with renewed vigor. Much like House Republicans continue to pull the rug out from under President Obama while he chases the mythical “median voter” by positioning himself as a fiscal conservative in the deficit talks, the leaders of Wisconsin labor have unsuccessfully sought to win over the great middle with the feeble battle cry “It’s not about the money, it’s about the rights.”
But it is about the money – and the rights. Once Walker signed the budget repair bill, the state budget quickly became the focus of the fight. The resistance blossomed from a labor dispute into an anti-austerity movement, and we care about the money: the billion dollars that will never make it to Wisconsin’s public schools, the 50 million dollars in tax increases on poor families who rely on the Earned Income Tax Credit for relief, the 500 million dollars in taxpayer giveaways to corporations, and yes, the hundreds of millions of dollars public employees will lose from their paychecks.
Perhaps the concessions were a shrewd tactic at the time, but who wants to be part of a labor movement that collects dues from you and then concedes to everything the boss demands when the pressure mounts? If labor is wondering why unionization rates have declined dramatically for decades and why only 1 in 6 organizing campaigns succeed, we should start by looking in the mirror. Workers want unions that fight for them, not unions that make nice with their bosses. Walker is the boss, and the boss wants to cut your wages, slash your benefits, and silence your voice in the workplace. It’s time to make ourselves the bosses and establish our own “new normal.”
Andrew Cole is a writer and member of UAW 1981, the National Writers Union. He lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin.
