Valley list servers last week came alive with notices of rallies on behalf of public service unions in Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker was supporting legislation that would take collective bargaining rights away from those unions. From Western Mass. Jobs with Justice and Pioneer Valley Street Heat to PHENOM, the state public education advocacy organization, local groups mobilized support campaigns for Wisconsin public workers as Tea Party members held counterrallies.
In Madison, thousands of people protested for days against the plan supported by Walker and Republican legislators. Using a tactic made famous by Democratic legislators in Texas when former U.S. House Majority Whip and now convicted felon Tom DeLay was pushing redistricting there, 14 Democratic lawmakers in Wisconsin fled to keep the legislature from having a quorum to vote on the anti-union legislation.
Similar legislation was offered in Ohio and Indiana as right-wing Republicans proposed to meet state budget crises by weakening public employee unions in order to cut worker pay and benefits. As the anti-union legislation drive has spread, protests have erupted from coast to coast. Support for the workers has come from as far away as Egypt and Poland.
Ironically, Wisconsin was the first state in the country to give its workers collective bargaining rights. Now some three-quarters of the states do, and most Americans, even if they feel that the unions should make some concessions in hard times, don’t want to see public workers lose their collective bargaining rights, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll.
The poll found that 61 percent of Americans would be against a law like the one offered in Wisconsin if it were proposed for their states. Only 33 percent said they would support such a law, even though 44 percent favored reducing pay or benefits for government workers—a sign that the respondents understood the difference between pay and benefit cuts and the withdrawal of collective bargaining rights.
A footnote: Walker’s election last fall was supported with heavy donations from the Koch family, whose conservative political events Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have been criticized for attending (“Order on the Court,” February 24, 2011). The donations were channeled through the Republican Governors’ Association and other groups.
