February solidarity rally in Washington, DC.
(Photo: Laura Clawson)
This week, the Republican anti-union, anti-worker agenda saw backlash, backlash, and backlash in polling. More concretely, it got turned back in multiple ways in Wisconsin: After much back and forth, Wisconsin Republicans decided to comply with the judge's order staying them from eliminating collective bargaining. Wisconsin Democrats filed recall signatures on the first targeted state senator. And faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point voted to unionize, making it a total of four since Scott Walker started trying to eliminate public employee collective bargaining.
Wisconsin may not be the only state that will see an election fueled by the elimination of collective bargaining rights. In Ohio, following the passage of SB5, Chris Bowers writes,
90 days must pass before the law goes into effect. During those 90 days, Ohio residents are given an opportunity to block the bill from taking effect and force a statewide referendum on it by gathering signatures equal to 6% of the vote in the 2010 gubernatorial election. Ohio opponents of SB 5 have vowed to do just that, and should not have any real trouble acquiring the necessary 231,147 signatures.The referendum will take place this November.
In New Hampshire, the state House passed a punitive, union-busting budget over the largest protest in the state in decades and after kicking people out of the House during deliberations. Several moderate Republican representatives were openly critical of the direction of their party:
"My big concern is we're cutting the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable people, while giving major relief to the people that really are not in difficult straits," Rep. Peter Bolster, an Alton Republican.
The budget isn't all New Hampshire's far-right Republicans have going, either. A proposed "right to work" bill (see here) drew this:
Labor Commissioner George Copadis said he has met with over 2,000 business owners and not one has ever lobbied for the state to adopt Right to Work.
Perhaps New Hampshire's Republican leadership will emulate Maine Gov. Paul LePage and release one bizarre letter not even purporting to be from a business owner to justify their push for this legislation.
Speaking of Maine, mural removal isn't all they're up to there. State Republicans are also taking aim at child labor laws. In addition to eliminating a law preventing minors from working full time during school,
Burns’ bill is particularly insidious, because it directly encourages employers to hire children or teenagers instead of adult workers. Because workers under 20 could be paid less than adults under this GOP proposal, minimum wage workers throughout Maine would likely receive a pink slip as their twentieth birthday present so that their boss could replace them with someone younger and cheaper.
Not content to remain on the sidelines, U.S. House Republicans included in the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill a union-busting provision that would count any person not voting in a union election as voting against the union. The White House suggested that President Obama might veto a bill containing this provision.
the Republican House of Representatives passed an amendment sponsored by Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) to a Republican-drafted aviation bill that would essentially gut the planned pilot fatigue rules by requiring extensive tailoring to many different segments of the aviation industry, and exempting several others.
Of course, airplanes are just the tip of the anti-union iceberg in this Congress; Jim DeMint tells ThinkProgress he'd like to strip collective bargaining rights from federal workers.
But attacks on union workers, child workers, airline industry workers who might like to become union members, and airline passengers aren't the only active part of the Republican anti-worker agenda. Several states are taking punitive action against unemployed people. Meteor Blades detailed how, in Michigan,
Governor Rick Snyder signed into law Monday a cut in future benefits from the nationwide standard of 26 weeks to 20 weeks beginning in January 2012.It was a tricky bit of business. The proposal originally was billed as a means of reducing unemployment fraud and ensuring that some 35,000 out-of-work Michiganders would continue to receive extended benefits up to 99 weeks that otherwise would be cut off under the federal formula for such payments. And the new law does, in fact, do that. But the cut in future benefits was slipped in quietly.
Florida and Arkansas are advancing similar bills. Meanwhile, in Missouri,
Republican Sens. Will Kraus of Lee’s Summit, Rob Schaaf of St. Joseph, Brian Nieves of Washington and Jim Lembke of Lemay have prevented a vote on a bill that would accept federal money for jobless benefits for people who have been unemployed for more than 79 weeks but less than 99 weeks.The senators say they’re sending a message to the federal government by refusing about $105 million allocated for unemployment benefits.
And this is all happening in the context of 2010 having seen a 27% increase in CEO pay while worker pay went up just 2%. Meanwhile, many large corporations are not only paying no taxes, they're getting rebates.
In other words, if you are not among the wealthiest Americans and you think that Republicans and their corporate masters aren't coming for you sooner rather than later, think again. Not being a union member or a public worker won't spare you. Being a child won't spare you.
The firepower being leveled at America's working families is astonishing, and the goal is nothing less than the destruction of the middle class, to ensure that we will all of us outside the top 5% or 10% be grateful to take what crumbs fall from them to us, and to turn us against each other so we won't notice who is responsible for stagnating wages and high unemployment and perpetual insecurity. But the thread that runs through so many of these stories is that working people are fighting back. In Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, New Hampshire, Maine, and elsewhere, a challenge is finally being flung up to the Scott Walkers and John Kasichs and Koch brothers.
That fight is being extended across the country this week, in days of solidarity centering on tomorrow, April 4, the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis where he had gone to support sanitation workers seeking many of the same things workers today are seeking. There will be events across the country—as Meteor Blades wrote:
Rallies and teach-ins in hundreds of cities. Not one cash-sucking, carbon-spewing, mass demonstration in D.C. or New York that will be soon forgotten, but a grassroots effort that can inspire and energize millions. And, instead of being over when the protesters drive or fly back home, this can lay the groundwork for a continual, local, decentralized, nationally networked movement whose organizing goes way beyond electing better leaders (although that remains a key element of any practical effort at fighting the rightist juggernaut and its enablers).
And not just rallies and teach-ins but vigils, documentary screenings, socials, discussions, workplace actions. If you can't make it to a rally, wear red to work, update your Facebook status to a message about solidarity and workers' rights, have a conversation on the issues with your family and friends, read Martin Luther King's "I've been to the mountaintop" speech delivered on the eve of his assassination, just do something to stand with workers everywhere. Find an event. Print a flier or teach-in materials or other information.
The assault on workers is news because we're making it news. If we weren't joining together and fighting back, Ohio's SB5 and Maine's mural and budgets in New Hampshire and Wisconsin would have slipped to three-paragraph stories in section Z of the newspapers by now. Let's keep making it news, and build a movement that will make it history.