http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/15/AR2011021504339.html?wpisrc=nl_pmopinions
Workers toppled a dictator in Egypt, but might be silenced in Wisconsin
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In the United States, by
contrast, February is shaping up as the cruelest month workers have known in
decades.
The coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens of thousands of
Egyptian workers went on strike beginning last Tuesday. By Friday, when Egypt's
military leaders apparently decided that unrest had reached the point where
Mubarak had to go, the Egyptians who operate the Suez Canal and their fellow
workers in steel, textile and bottling factories; in hospitals, museums and
schools; and those who drive buses and trains had left their jobs to protest
their conditions of employment and governance. As Jim Hoagland noted in The
Post, Egypt was barreling down the path that Poland, East Germany and the
Philippines had taken, the path where workers join student protesters in the
streets and jointly sweep away an authoritarian regime.
But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo, one state
government in particular was moving to topple workers' organizations here in
the United States. Last Friday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin's new Republican
governor, proposed taking away most collective bargaining rights of public
employees. Under his legislation, which has moved so swiftly through the newly
Republican state legislature that it might come to a vote Thursday, the unions
representing teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public
hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose the right to
bargain over health coverage, pensions and other benefits. (To make his
proposal more politically palatable, the governor exempted from his hit list
the unions representing firefighters and police.) The only thing all other
public-sector workers could bargain over would be their base wages, and given
the fiscal restraints plaguing the states, that's hardly anything to bargain
over at all.
You might think that Walker came to this extreme measure after negotiations
with public-sector unions had reached an impasse. In fact, he hasn't held such
discussions. "I don't have anything to negotiate," Walker told the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel last week. To underscore just how accompli he considered his
fait, he vowed to call in the National Guard if protesting workers walked off
the job or disrupted state services.
It's a throwback to 19th-century America, when strikes were suppressed by force
of arms. Or, come to think of it, to Mubarak's Egypt or communist Poland and
East Germany.
Now, it's not as if our states don't have fiscal crises to address, and Walker
insists that it's Wisconsin's empty till that has driven him to curtail
workers' rights. But there are other options. Democratic governors such as
California's Jerry Brown and New York's Andrew Cuomo have proposed scaling back
public services, pay and benefits without going after workers' fundamental
rights to bargain. The right to bargain is clearly a separate question. Newly
elected Republican governors, however, may reach the same conclusion Walker did
and use the recession-induced fiscal crisis to achieve a partisan political
objective: removing unions, the most potent force in the Democrats' electoral
operation, from the landscape. "If we just stop and cure the pension problem,
we have not gone far enough," Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute's City
Journal said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend.
The real goal of the American right is to reduce public employee unions to the
level of private-sector unions, which now represent fewer than 7 percent of
American workers. Walker's proposal not only confines public-sector unions to
annual bargaining over wage increases but restricts the increases for state
employees to raises in the consumer price index and compels every such union to
hold an annual membership vote to determine whether the union can continue to
represent workers. It clearly intends to smash these unions altogether.
Which would yield what? Our unions have already been decimated in the private
sector; the results are plain. Corporate profits are soaring, while domestic
investment, wages and benefits (particularly at nonunion companies) are
flat-lining at best. With nobody to bargain for workers, America increasingly
is an economically stagnant, plutocratic utopia. Is everybody happy?
American conservatives often profess admiration for foreign workers' bravery in
protesting and undermining authoritarian regimes. Letting workers exercise
their rights at home, however, threatens to undermine some of our own regimes
(the Republican ones particularly), and shouldn't be permitted. Now that
Wisconsin's governor has given the Guard its marching orders, we can discern a
new pattern of global repressive solidarity emerging - from the chastened
pharaoh of the Middle East to the cheesehead pharaoh of the Middle West.
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