Wisconsin: a Referendum on Unions

I was expecting Scott Walker to survive the Wisconsin recall vote, and he did. There were basically three reasons:

First: money, money, money, money, money, money, money. Walker took in seven times more money than his opponent, Tom Barrett. Most of that money came from outside Wisconsin, from corporate honchos like the Koch brothers.

Second: Walker just got done beating Barrett in 2010. It was a mistake for Democrats to rerun the loser of the last election.

Third: the election was really Walker vs. The Unions. Walker won by turning the election into a referendum on unions.

Unions aren't very popular these days. Private-sector unions are nearly extinct, and people like Walker are well on their way to castrating public-sector unions. The problem is inherent: the only real bargaining chip unions have is the strike, and strikes inconvenience everyone. Strikes make union members seem selfish and obstructionist. No one remembers how company thugs, often with the help of law enforcement, beat and killed union organizers back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These days people perceive union members as thugs who threaten people at picket lines.

Unions don't help themselves by pushing for work rules that appear to be featherbedding, demanding unsustainable levels of retirement and health care benefits and opposing changes necessitated by new technologies and shifting business conditions worldwide. The past association of some unions with organized crime is a stigma that is hard to beat, no matter that corruption in corporate management is far more pervasive.

Unions are messy democratic institutions that hold elections and conduct most of their business in public. Corporations are tidy oligarchic dictatorships that do all their conniving out of the public eye, have slick PR people issuing carefully crafted statements, and plenty of money to pay off anyone who might reveal embarrassing facts (as. for example, Rupert Murdoch has spent millions upon millions of dollars in hush money to cover up the phone hacking scandal in Britain).

To survive, the labor movement has to turn public sentiment around and convince Americans that unions are a public good. As union membership has declined, so has the average worker's salary, in real terms. It's simple economics: if there are fewer high-paying union jobs, other employers will be able to offer lower salaries, which non-union workers will have to take. American workers have been in this downward wage spiral for the last 40 years.

Many people perceive union members as doing less work for more money. The truth is that union workers did work harder to earn higher salaries: they organized and used their collective power to achieve better pay and working conditions.

Most of us think of our workplaces as a home away from home and consider our coworkers to be friends or family, and some even consider employers to be like parents. But non-union workers who put all their hard work into doing the actual job in the hopes that they will be rewarded for their devotion and loyalty are making a sentimental mistake.

At the end of the day employers, particularly large corporations, don't care about loyalty. It's all about the money. I'll be the first to admit that it has to be that way. But they will fire your ass the instant it pays for them to do so. Your immediate supervisor might be a nice guy and almost like a father, but he takes his orders from the guys on top, and if he won't fire you his replacement will.

But money also perverts good corporate stewardship. Many corporations will fire your ass even if it materially harms the ability of the company to do its work, as long as it makes the stock price jump and earns the CEO a multi-million dollar bonus.

If it's okay for employers to have this mercenary money-money-money mindset, why shouldn't employees have it as well? Unions do: they're essentially employee-owned corporations that sell labor. They know that employers will pit employees against each other and pick them off one by one unless the employees are organized and stick together.

But until unions clean up their act and show Americans they are a force for economic growth and fairness, corporate surrogates like Scott Walker will continue to make unions the issue. And Americans will be forced to work longer hours, for lower salaries, under even less desirable conditions.