It's become fashionable in America to bash the unionsm writes Dave Zweifel of The Capital Times.
Corporate America is winning the public relations fight. Unions are the bad guys, never willing to give, always wanting more. Witness the Wisconsin State Journal's unrelenting crusade to vilify public employee unions. While taxpayers are hurting, the public workers, through their unions, refuse to share the pain, the paper insists. Bus drivers earn way too much money. Unlike non-union private employees, city and county workers have Cadillac health and pension benefits.
The message: All workers should get less.
Yes, let's begin a race to the bottom. Isn't that, after all, what this has historically been all about? Gut the unions, give the rich tax breaks under the guise that they'll spend the money to boost the economy and all will be well.
It's why, of course, the disparity between the rich and the poor is at historic levels now.
And, frankly, that isn't good.
Unions were at their zenith after World War II. Hardworking blue-collar employees fought for and won contracts that paid them well. It all served to build a healthy middle class that became the economic hallmark of America for several decades.
Then came the Reaganomics of the 1980s with tax cuts for the rich and a vicious anti-union climate that began eating away at that middle class.
As Bob Herbert of the New York Times put it the other day, "It's no accident that the great progressive successes of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, a variety of other social justice movements, and the emergence of a vast and thriving middle class all converged in the early post-World War II decades.
"But the counterattack from the right, with its assaults on labor, its outlandishly regressive tax policies, its slavish devotion to corporate power and its divide-and-conquer strategies on racial and ethnic issues all combined to halt the remarkable advances of ordinary working people."
And so here we are today. What's left of the middle class has trouble paying its mortgages, much less discretionary funds that could help spur the economy.
The truth is that the rich alone can't turn the country's fortunes around.
It's what happens, though, when the race is to the bottom, instead of the top.
(The preceding column by Dave Zweifel was published by The Capital Times on July 23, 2010. Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times.)
