There is an unreported phenomenon taking place underneath Wisconsin’s historic labor struggle: the lives of tens of thousands of people, young and old, union and non-union, are being permanently changed by this experience. You can hear it in their words and see it in their faces.
A Labor Movement divided by differing levels of relative privilege has been united — hopefully for the long-term if not permanently.
Scores of ordinary people have abandoned blind party loyalties in the face of betrayal by elected leaders at every level.
They are beginning to recognize the moral bankruptcy of politicians attempting to disguise corporate-sponsored attacks on peoples’ rights and livelihoods as fiscal responsibility and reform.
For the first time they have directly experienced the corporate-owned media’s willful distortion of events that they themselves witnessed or participated in, and they are now starting to question what they read in the papers and hear on television.
They’ve gained the understanding – an understanding that is foreign to a culture in which individualism is so relentlessly promoted – that they are part of something much bigger, and that their fates are ultimately bound to those of other people.
They are experiencing a profound sense of solidarity, not just with their neighbors and coworkers, but with citizens from all over the state and different parts of the country, and even around the world.
They have woken up to find themselves in the middle of a brutal class war, and now they have seen a model of how they can fight back. This is as true for high school and college students as it is for many of the people who were previously drawn to the tea party’s populist messages, and also the returning veterans who now realize that instead of being deployed half-way around the world, they could have stayed and fought to defend freedom and democracy here at home.
Recent events in other societies have shown us that this kind of awareness creates energy that is powerful and unpredictable. Win or lose in Wisconsin, there is no way of knowing how and where the seeds planted during this struggle will end up blooming in the coming years.
Hey Tom, I came across this half of a point-counterpoint in Newsweek this week that I found utterly disturbing in the scope of the lie the writer presents. See if you catch my drift.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/27/do-we-still-need-unions-no.html
I don’t really feel qualified to address this as I am not a member of a union, only a son of a union family.
Thanks, Tom. I followed your link, and all I can say is — Wow. I couldn’t tell if that guy was just some hateful contrarian or if he’s really a bonafide contributor that Newsweek is putting up in contrast to Ezra Klein. (And, by the way, I sure don’t think you have to be a union member to address something like this — I’d rather put my time into working on something to post here than post another comment at Newsweek. What are your thoughts?)
But (here’s my rant:), I think it’s astonishing to hear a post-Citizens United argument that Union money exerts undue influence on our political system, especially as those contributions are on their way to being completely eclipsed by corporate money — a fact which apparently isn’t keeping the Newsweek guy awake at night. Rachel Maddow has called some attention to the fact that Unions are the last and only significant non-corporate political contributors. She says this makes Unions subject to attacks by Republicans, but it looks to me like the corporate and financial sectors are hedging their bets — the legislative attacks on what’s left of the U.S. labor movement appear to be coming from both Republicans (in the guise of budget-cutting measures) and Democrats (in Illinois, for instance, in the guise of school reform legislation).
OK, rant over. Thanks for the link — let me know your thoughts about whether or not it merits a specific response in Newsweek or elsewhere.
What I found disturbing was the writer’s conclusion that taxpayers are subsidizing union dues. I believe union dues are paid only by union members and it comes from their pockets. To say that union dues is subsidized by the taxpayers is to say the union worker’s toothpaste and food is also subsidized by the taxpayer. I find this bit of conclusion jumping to be rather offensive — as if the wages a member of the public sector makes do not belong to that person but are the taxpayers. Ironically, that is called communism.
That writer also seems ignorant of the fact that Union’s are prohibited by law from using dues money to fund their PACs or otherwise make political donations. The Union PAC money that does exist (and I would argue that Citizens United will make that Union money less significant with each successive election cycle) comes from voluntary member contributions rather than from their dues.