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The spirited and determined support for civil service and for workers’ defense in Wisconsin is as pleasant a surprise as the uprisings in the Middle East. Bizarrely, though, the remaking of entire countries to achieve representative governance may be a more confident bet than our stopping the right’s juggernaut attack on our own civil society and the working and middle classes. Seven other states besides Wisconsin (Ohio, South Dakota, Colorado, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma) are considering weakening or abolishing collective bargaining. All fifty states want to limit public workers’ benefits. (All info in this post comes from THE NATION, 3/7/11).
If this latter sounds just fine to those people disturbed by the size of public pensions, note that in fifteen states, local and state employees are not eligible for Social Security, and rely entirely on their pensions. Also, the right is determined to enable states to declare bankruptcy, allowing them to walk away from all of their pension obligations. This would leave many public workers with nothing, as those pensions are not guaranteed by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. The right has already pretty much destroyed private pensions, and now is determined to destroy already under attack public ones.
BTW, the supposed excessive pay of public workers is such a cynical deception. Public workers are not nineteen-year-old high school dropout Walmart shelf stockers, but rather are more likely to be well-educated, older and more experienced. When private and public workers of the same age and education are compared, the public worker is paid about 4% LESS than the private worker.
And, come on, this recession didn’t result from paying a Cooperative Extension agronomist a modest wage for her expertise, or from letting the widow of a slain cop have his pension. Yet that’s who the right insists must bail out an economy that was gutted by the games of the wealthy. Not only are the workers expected to make up what was stolen by those speculators who sold out just before the crash, but these same millionaires and billionaires are being given even greater gifts from the public sector as tax breaks.
BTWII, claims that state pension funds are doomed to collapse are based on absurdly slanted assumptions that fund managers will magically become really bad at their jobs and reverse their long history of strong management. New York State’s teacher pension fund managers, for instance, did not get suckered into investing in those toxic assets that took so many people’s IRAs away, and so NYS teachers still have pensions. Now, should teachers be punished for prudently husbanding their payroll deductions? According to the right, yes, their savings should be redistributed upwards from those spoiled brats to the millionaires and billionaires as tax cuts.
BTWIII, those gifts to the wealthy are supposed to induce them to give us jobs. Baloney! They’re not going to hire us to make products there’s no market for. If there are emerging markets in India and China, the workers making the goods won’t be here in America. So we’re supposed to redistribute our modest savings upward to build factories in Indonesia for the sole benefit of millionaires and billionaires who won’t pay any taxes here in America?
Wisconsin’s feistiness HAS to spread to all fifty states if we’re to have a chance of slowing the momentum of the right’s steamroller. We can’t let Wisconsin’s insurgency make us complacent. But, we also can’t let ourselves despair. We beat down the Robber Barons before. We can do it again.
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