And, my old boss from JFK days, former Assistant Secretary of Commerce Jack Behrman, reminds me that the National Labor Relations Board was set up in the 1930s to support collective bargaining. It was critical in World War Two in moderating labor's wage demands to prevent inflation, which restriction led the NLRB to permit bargaining for other benefits; these led to donations by companies to health insurance and was the beginning of national health insurance.
But shouldn't we fault the American labor movement for not doing a better job of educating union members so that they wouldn't vote against their own economic self-interests and remain quiet while their elected representatives legislated against those very same interests?
Where was the outcry from labor when President Obama acceded to demands to continue George W. Bush's upper-class tax cut as the Republicans' price for not raising taxes on ordinary working Americans? It was largely AWOL. And ineffectual.
So, fault the unions? You bet. We should be mad as hell. Just as we should be mad as hell at some of the excesses of the union movement. But in the Great Crash of 2008, it was banks and other corporations who created our economic nightmare. Was our response to throw banks and other corporations under the bus? To abolish them altogether? No, in fact, it was to bail them out.
In his faux phone talk with Charles Koch, it was clear that closing his state's fiscal gap was a secondary objective for Governor Walker. His primary goal was to break the unions. It had to be, since these teachers, firefighters, nurses and other first responders have already said they would go along with the governor and make the sacrifices necessary to do their part to help close the state's $6.3 billion budget deficit.
But Governor Walker is still saying he has the same $3.6 billion budget deficit to balance. It was like the union response never happened!
And, by the way, I wonder if the Governor was thinking of that gap when, shortly after taking office, he handed the wealthiest people in his state a generous tax cut.
Does the Governor really expect us to believe that it is public service unions alone that are responsible for that $6.3 billion budget gap?
If he believes that, I have a terrific bridge to sell him.
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