Colorado Labor Blog

Colorado’s union leaders should be prepared f0r a barrage of anti-worker legislation to be introduced in the 2012 session of the state legislature, which begins on January 11.

After all, 2012 is an election year and that is prime time for posturing by both Democrats and Republicans. With a divided legislature in Colorado it is doubtful that legislation seriously offensive to either party’s base will be passed.

But one has to be careful.

Lawmakers from both parties will be introducing all sorts of goofy proposals to prove to their bases they are doing something for the cause — and the campaign contributions.

And in election years, strange things sometimes happen. Some Democrats in swing districts might decide it’s in their best interest to vote like Republicans. Less likely, but possible nonetheless, a few Republicans might vote with Democrats.

An indication of what might face Colorado workers in the 2012 legislature came late in the 2011 session when 26 House Republicans enlisted in the war against workers by introducing a proposal that would have prohibited collective bargaining by state employees, even though Colorado State employees don’t have collective bargaining rights.

They didn’t care; they wanted to send a message to state workers, the same message that Governors Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio tried to send to workers in their states last year: We don’t care about workers’ rights; we’re out to gut their wages, hours and working conditions.

Labor unions all over the country should be energized after the big win yesterday in Ohio where voters overwhelmingly rejected a law that stripped public sector unions of collective bargaining rights.

Ohio Governor John Kasich signed Senate Bill 5 into law last March after it was passed by the Republican-controlled legislature. The bill was Kasich’s scapegoat for pushing an extreme anti-worker agenda that favors the richest 1 percent at the expense of the remaining 99 percent of the nation’s population.

The repeal of Senate Bill 5 by a vote of the people was a huge win for working men and women. It proved to doubters that organized labor still has the ability to come alive and effectively perform in the political arena.

How much fun is it to listen to right-wing radio pundits — such as gasbags Rush Limbaugh, Mike Rosen and Dan Caplis — whine about the protesters at Occupy Denver in Civic Center Park?

Hey, guys, don’t complain. Do your own protest. Gather a thousand or so of your millionaire/billionaire pals and stage your own occupation. You could call it the “one percent movement” and have it at Cherry Hills Country Club or some other fancy place. You’d be among friends there and they wouldn’t snitch on you to the cops for trespassing.

And you wouldn’t have to mingle with the Great Unwashed in downtown Denver.

It’s always the same old story with the righties: The protesters are all “long-haired, college kids” or “lazy, anti-American, refugees from the ’60s who ought take a bath and go find a real job,” even though — thanks to George W. Bush — there are no real jobs to find.

But what really pisses them off is that the protesters are criticizing America’s glorious capitalistic system, which, it seems to me, is a bit off track at the moment.

Hooray for Jim Hoffa.

He told it like it is earlier this month when he called Tea Party Republicans “sons of bitches” on CNN. What better describes politicians who seek to destroy the labor movement, which has done more to build and protect the middle class than any other American institution?

In contrast to organized labor, the Tea Party, a newcomer to the political scene, has done nothing for the commonwealth. Rather, it has embarked on a campaign, financed by the Koch brothers and other rightwing billionaires, to destroy the nation’s social fabric.

These Tea Party yahoos are in the forefront of the war on working men and women, leading the race to the bottom, to a Third World workforce for the United States. They support shipping good paying jobs to other countries. In their perfect world, we would have a national right-to-work law. Workers would be paid slave wages, benefits would be nonexistent and working conditions would be abominable.

Our public education system would be eviscerated. Rich kids would be educated in private schools, mostly funded with taxpayer money, while poor kids would attend dilapidated, underfunded public schools. Our police officers and firefighters would be overworked and underpaid and there would be no regulation to prevent corporate crime, which has become epidemic in the past 20 years.

It was predictable, of course, that Fox News and a multitude of right-wing nutcakes on the Internet — such as Andrew Breitbart — would take umbrage at the Teamster leader’s remarks.

Teamsters were described as “thugs” and Hoffa as a “union boss” who was attempting to incite violence against the Tea Party. The Tea Party Express Chairwoman Amy Kremer said Hoffa’s comments were “disgraceful.”

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