An increasingly frequent meme among Republicans in Wisconsin and elsewhere is that public employee unions erroneously refer to their collective bargaining "rights." No, shout the Repubs, collective bargaining is not a right, it's a privilege. And now, thanks to the current hegemony of wingnut Republican legislators, public employees in Wisconsin have (excepting some police and fire unions) far fewer such "privileges." All this from some of the most privileged elites among us, who, meanwhile, increasingly push to turn their own vast set of government-backed boons into permanent rights (Take away tax cuts for billionaires? Horrors!).
This anti-unionism is sad, tragic and ironic, coming from the same partisans who in recent years have tried to appropriate the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Some of them literally claim he was a Republican, and thus a member of the party that favored "true" civil rights against relatively conservative southern Democrats (while ignoring the fact that it was one such Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, who almost single-handedly engineered the 1964 Civil Rights Act). The revisionists edit King's words to imply he wouldn't be in favor of many modern civil rights laws. But of course, these are the same dudes who want you to think FDR opposed public employee unions, a conclusion they arrive at by -- as in the case of King -- mouthing only a very little of what FDR said while ignoring the larger, contrary context.
Regarding Dr. King: What did he really think about that rights-versus-privileges idea? Well, as it turns out, the GOP Ministry of Truth is especially egregious in its rewrite of Dr. King. After all, many of our constitutional (ahem!) rights were codified only after years of informal privilege, bestowed upon the people by the people themselves, until their increasing numbers forced legislators to catch up. Indeed, if conservatives in both major parties hadn't intervened, every citizen of America would, right now, have the right to a family-supporting job, thanks to FDR's proposal for a second bill of rights. Yes, that would be the same FDR who supposedly was against working-class laborers.
In Dr. King's case, it's very instructive to remember this: On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis. He had traveled there to stand with AFSCME sanitation workers demanding their right to bargain collectively.