Many of the unions' best leaders and organizers from the 1930's were driven out of the unions by Taft-Hartley, because they either were or had been Communists or Socialists. Their "replacements" were individuals who were not interested in "rocking the boat." They substituted wage and benefit increases for the dream of "social democracy" that men like Eugene V. Debs and John L. Lewis had strived to establish. Abuse of workers by corporations increased, and continued to increase, as both physical and emotional working conditions on the job site deteriorated due to automation, cost-cutting measures, and union leaders who were increasingly in the pocket of ownership, as evidenced by "no-strike" clauses in their contracts.
The aspect of unions that the corporate oligarchy fears most is the collective action of the working and middle classes to oppose the oligarchs' hegemonic quest for power and wealth. Whether it is bargaining for better conditions and benefits with more of a say in the work place, or opposing the self-serving actions of the plutocracy in our courts, legislatures, and executive offices at both the state and Federal level; unions represent the sole, ongoing, organized opposition to the depredations of the plutocracy in this country. This is the reason that the first assault on President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was the Taft-Hartley Act, by Congressman Hartley's own admission (The New National Labor Policy, Fred A Hartley, Jr.; New York, Funk and Wagnalls , 1948, p. xvi.).
To quote Theodore Roosevelt, " It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize."
This is especially true of the union employees who actually work for We the People, the civil servants at every level of government.
The public employees are under attack because they are the only ones left in our government who will stand in the way of the plutocracy treating the laws in this country like toilet paper. Of course you can't blame the plutocrats: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their minions treated the U.S. Constitution in the same disgraceful manner, and the contagion seems to have spread to President Obama's Administration. (See David Johnson's May 19, 2011 Campaign for America's Future article "NLRB v. Boeing--Corporations Fear the Law Itself," for one of the most blatant examples of the corporations breaking the laws, and our civil servants doing their job.
http://www.ourfuture.org/trackback/67575 )
David Harsanyi wrote an inflammatory editorial in the February 25, 2011 issue of the Denver Post, in which he stated that, "Right or wrong, public employee unions can only revolt against the public."
First, a strike is not a revolt, and only a die-hard propagandist would describe it as such.
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