Friday, February 25, 2011

Union Busting-Another Slice and Dice of the Middle Class

The financial sector screws up and throws the whole world into a recession. The middle class loses millions of job and picks up a multi-trillion dollar tab to save our incompetent economic infrastructure. What should we do next? Let’s use our financial screw-ups as an excuse to bust the unions. We can call them communists or socialists- that always seems to work. Let’s blame the teachers and government workers for the financial shortfall the states are experiencing. And let’s do it now while they are really down and out and desperate for jobs.


I have often wondered just how much abuse the middle class is capable of absorbing from the governing elite. With unjustified wars, an active special interest auction in congress, and the unpunished stealing of trillions from our economy we should have already reached the limit. Because of our numbers and the fact that we do the real productive work of society you would think there would be some caution about overreaching against us. But they seem to have such confidence in their mind control infrastructure they continue to push. Good leadership would be pulling the nation together to resolve our problems. Vilifying teachers and, government workers while attacking unions has the exact opposite effect.

It should be clear by now that the current financial problems are due to national financial sector mismanagement and fraud, not unions. In fact, unions and government worker pension plans suffer the same way that we all have. In hard times they can be expected to make the same sacrifices as all workers.

The union is an important element in our economy. They were strongly pro-America as administrations shipped millions of jobs overseas. Without their influence the individual workers would be on their own against the many billions of corporate dollars dedicated to short term profits. Union workers have the detailed knowledge of facility operations that can be turned into process improvements. When management and the union work cooperatively in trust and professional pride there is potential for many economic benefits. Many facilities miss this opportunity because of an ingrained attitude of confrontation between management and the union.

You have to wonder about the management capabilities of the new Wisconsin government. By picking now as the time for union busting they have transformed a straightforward budget balancing event into a national confrontation. You would expect that they would first try to gain the trust and support of the employees. Instead they now have a demoralized work force of thousands in a trying financial environment.

No matter who wins the battle the nation will be weakened and further divided. In a time when we need to pull the disillusioned middle class back into a national consensus another sector is being split off. There were many ways to cut costs that did not attack collective bargaining.

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