In their campaign to stifle the rights of public employees
in Wisconsin, the would-be masters of the universe are fanning the embers of a
human vice: envy.
You no longer have the
nifty pension or health insurance or the decent pay or the union protection that
you or your parents once enjoyed. You may have even lost your job. Yet, look at
those fat-cat public employees, strutting around with their good salaries and benefits
and their union rights – all made possible with your hard-earned money. That’s
so unfair. They should suffer just like you do.
The upshot is that this message is being brought to the
working stiffs in the private sector by the very people who helped make them
suffer: our corporate overlords (think brothers Charles and David Koch among
others). They helped shove those workers onto a downward economic spiral. Now
these tycoons are counting on their victims to reach up and grab their public-sector
brothers and sisters and pull them down that spiral, too.
Some Wisconsin workers have bought that message, as
indicated by signs on display at a relatively small counter-protest at the Capitol
in Madison on Feb. 19. (See photos on
this page.) One sign – “IT’S MY MONEY NOT YOUR HUMAN RIGHT” – particularly reflects
the anti-government message coming out of talk radio and right-wing think tanks
(financed by our corporate oligarchy) over the last three decades.
We don’t tell workers at our cable TV company or our computer
store they shouldn’t bargain for fair wages because that’s our money they’re
dealing with. Rather, we figure that once the money leaves our hands, it’s no
longer ours. What’s ours is the 200 TV channels or the 500-gigabyte computer we
got in exchange.
Likewise, in exchange for the money we give government, we
get valuable services. Public-sector workers lock up bad guys, plow snow on the
route to work, teach first graders their numbers and letters, make sure rat
feces don’t flavor our pasta dish, put out house fires before they reach our
homes and maintain our favorite parks.
True, unlike in the private sector, we are not just
consumers; we are also collec
tively the boss of public employees – which gives
us the right to debate how the money ought to be spent, but also the moral duty
to be a fair boss and to give just compensation for work done. Collective
bargaining helps ensure we fulfill that duty.
Fortunately, the appeal to envy has had only limited success,
polls suggest. Most people in Wisconsin
and in America
side with the effort of public employees to maintain their bargaining rights (though
Wisconsin residents are evenly split on Gov. Scott Walker’s bill). Doubtless, labor’s
readiness to concede on all economic issues has helped it in the battle of
public opinion. Gov. Walker’s refusal to compromise in the face of that
concession shows that his real goal is to castrate the unions.
A big reason America’s middle class has receded is that
labor unions have eroded in the private sector. One possible response of workers
there is to resent their compatriots in the public sector, where labor strength
has grown over the last several decades. But most workers have not succumbed to
that temptation. Rather, they astutely recognize that the middle class is less
likely to rebound if public-sector labor unions lose their strength, too.
