A bill to reduce the bargaining power of public employee unions in Massachusetts has been filed in the state Legislature (see related article “It Can Happen Here”). A few weeks ago the Advocate had a short chat with a local labor leader who told us he was fairly confident the bill wouldn’t get much traction in the Bay State. “That bill’s not going anywhere,” he said.
This is a fellow with a lot of experience and a hotline to the state AFL-CIO, and he may be right. But the conservative move to cut back the bargaining power of public unions, using the states’ financial problems as a rationale, isn’t just going on in the Midwest. It’s encircling New England.
In Maine, Gov. Paul LePage caused a furor when he ordered a mural with images of working people removed from the state Labor Department building. The mural depicted dramatic events in the history of labor in Maine: a strike at a paper mill in Jay, another at a shoe factory in Lewiston and women working as shipbuilders at the Bath Iron Works. But businesspeople had complained, said the governor, because it only depicted laborers, not management. (The federal Department of Labor has now told Gov. LePage that if he doesn’t put the mural back on display, he’ll have to pay back the $60,000 it cost.)
Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, the state’s Republican-dominated House of Representatives has passed a bill that would cause all public employees to become “at-will” (nonunionized) workers if and when their union contracts expire. In effect, the measure would decertify the unions as their contracts run out.
These challenges to labor highlight a long shift in the situation of the American worker. From World War II into the ’60s and beyond, the typical working person who stayed with his or her company 20 years or more got a defined benefits pension. Now very few people get them, though study after study proves that the 401Ks that have taken their place aren’t sufficient to finance retirement.
So history is being rewritten as though pensions were luxuries. That casts public employees as privileged, a strategy calculated to turn workers who don’t get pensions against them.
To be fair, it’s true that public pensions have been inflated in recent years. In this state, the UMass trustees perpetrated a shameless inflation of ex-UMass president Billy Bulger’s salary near the end of his tenure in order to fatten his pension; that led to the tightening of rules governing the formula for public employee pensions here.
But reining in the number of six-figure public pensions is completely different from removing pensions and other benefits from one of the last sizable classes of worker that still has them, leaving the only instrument capable of capitalizing a decent retirement restricted to the financially elite.
It’s also said, credibly, that what’s masked as a cost-cutting program for the states is a plan to defund the Democratic Party by dissolving the labor groups that are among its largest funders. “We have to defund the left,” conservative Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann recently said.
And last week Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who moved earlier this year to eliminate the bargaining power of public employee unions in his state, was called to testify in a Congressional hearing on state and municipal debt. When Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio asked him how much money his plan to cut back the unions’ bargaining power would save, Walker said his measure, which kindled a near-revolution across the country, “wouldn’t save any.” What would it accomplish, then, except weakening the unions?
