Not long ago, it was a foreign-born Barack Obama who mostly likely was a secret Muslim. Then it was Spanish-speaking, dark-skinned Latino immigrants who may or not be properly documented or some of their children who (not exactly their decision) were born on U.S. soil making them U.S. citizens, shocking many in the hard-right. And, of course, the deficit scare-mongers (some of them familiar to this blog) who miraculously got the right-the-federal budget religion on exactly the same day that Obama took office.
Now, we have new targets, namely, your everyday public school teachers, firemen, sanitation workers and police. These are middle class people whose lives are based on community service rather than making big bucks. Some belong to labor unions, which is actually their constitutional right to do. But to hear the conservative drum-beaters tell it, starting with Fox News, they are strangling our economy and nation with their obscene demands.
These sniveling free-loaders and their puffed out unions are responsible for making hash of the budgets and economies of places like Wisconsin. In Rhode Island, teachers have all received possible layoff notices. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christi has pushed the Garden State to the brink in his face-off with public unions. These tough measures, they all claim, are essential because of the financial “crisis” they face.
Here in Virginia, we luckily don’t have the same confrontations. For one reason, our budget situation isn’t as bad as some other states. Plus, we don’t have that many union members. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that Virginia had all of 161,000 union members last year, down 5,000 from 2009. Many of them are federal workers or work at some large manufacturing outfits such as Newport News Shipbuilding.
Virginia’s GOP leadership, nonetheless, is more than happy to jump in the fray. Gov. Bob McDonnell, no friend to the working man, was on a cable news network the other day, praising Virginia’s 64-year-old right-to-work lay for keeping evil unions from befouling the lives of everyday Virginians. Curiously, he also gave possible Senatorial candidate George Allen a big push while faintly noting a “Tea Party” person (Jamie Radtke) without stating her name.
You have the Richmond Times-Disgrace wondering where former Gov. and head of the Democratic National Committee chief Tim Kaine really comes down on the union-bashing going on in Wisconsin.
So, the Republican network is milking the issue for all it can. They are trying to establish a rift between the “middle class” whom they want to court and the people who teach their children and protect their lives and property. Like bashing Latinos, this class-based smear campaign is entirely cynical.
A few other points:
Places like Wisconsin and New Jersey are culturally different than a quasi-Southern/government job state like Virginia. In other words, people in places that these don’t put up with as much crap from the bosses the way people do here. In the Midwest and Northeast, being a union member is considered an honorable thing and generations of workers owe their liveliehoods, pensions and work-rules to organizers from long-ago.
Virginia, by contrast, has to live down its history where business executives treated workers as slaves or chattel. In the textile belt from Southside to George, southern mill bosses kept out unions and pitted black against white workers to keep wages down so they could steal business from up north. Don’t believe me? Check out W.J. Cash’s 1941 masterwork, “The Mind of the South.”
“Right to work” is always misunderstood. It means that a worker can’t be forced to join a union as a condition of employment is a state says so. That’s all it means. Meanwhile, many Virginia companies get away with neo-yellow dog employment contracts, hatched by lawyers and human resources flunkies, stating that a prospective hire as to agree that he or she understands the firm prefers a “union free” environment. In corporatese, that’s not coercion, of course.
These attitudes automatically assume that Southern corporate management is always right, makes the best strategic decisions and that its workers are lucky to have jobs, period. That however, isn’t always the case. After working for 18 years for a global media company, I accepted a job at a Richmond-based one, where management by fear ruled the cubicles. The bosses, it turned out, were not rocket scientists after all, as the firm’s stock slide in about 10 years from $65 or so a share to about $5, after bobbing in the delisting territory of $1. I bailed on my holdings at about $60– probably the smartest thing I have every done.
The McDonnells and the George Allens and the RTD editorial writers all are part of this same anti-worker and anti-labor alliance. It is rather disgusting to see them cheer on the sidelines as average folk get bashed once again for problems not of their making.
Peter Galuszka
