Colorad Labor Blog

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.

It was a strong message not only to Republicans, but also to Democrats who should have gained insight on what they stand to lose if they continue to get down on their knees for corporate campaign contributions.

Democratic candidates must realize there are two sides in every fight — whether it is a back-alley brawl or a political debate. Many of them now play for both sides, which corrupts the system. Pick a side, Democrats, and get in the battle.

If you choose labor’s side, you gain an undying ally. But if you accept campaign contributions and support from labor’s enemies, labor shouldn’t hesitate to take extreme measures, such as supporting opposition candidates in primary elections, to achieve its goal.

Corporations are not people, regardless of what the U.S. Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say. Corporations are labor’s political enemy. That is proven over and over by their continual support of anti-worker legislation, such as Senate Bill 5 in Ohio, and politicians like Kasich and his pal, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

The message of Ohio should also be a forceful reminder to nonunion workers, who are fearful for their jobs in a bad economy, that unions are the best hope for the future of all working families.

Trade unions have always been the pathway to the middle class and that won’t change unless organized labor is destroyed. So, if you’re not a union member, sign an authorization card and vote union.

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.

Proof of the pudding is the American government giving tax breaks to so-called American corporations for shipping thousands of American jobs to foreign countries. Those were real jobs.

The rightwing apologists for wealthy Wall Street manipulators apparently don’t see any problem in the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States. The middle class is being squeezed out of the equation and that portends a huge problem for the corporations and small businesses, which the right-wing reveres. Where will consumers’ buying power come from when there is no middle class? I doubt our form of capitalism can survive without a middle class.

Huge tax cuts for the rich, passed during the administration of George W. Bush, haven’t created a single job. In fact, they have actually helped to widen the gap between rich and poor.

I have no idea if this occupation strategy, which is now underway in many states, will last, or if it will have any effect on the politicians who are charged with making decisions on the nation’s economy. But, the last real citizens’ uprising in this country — the Vietnam War protest — had great impact on the politicians at that time. Remember, it forced President Lyndon Johnson to opt out of running for a second full term.

While the war protesters didn’t stop the war, they probably shortened it and exposed how wrong-headed it was. Too bad we didn’t learn.

But the elimination of selective service (the draft) and the advent of the all-volunteer military services effectively got politicians — and their draft age kids — off the hook. We haven’t had any serious war protests since, not even today when we need them most.

If right-wing Republicans don’t believe there is a problem when unemployment is 9.2 percent, but is really much higher, when other factors, such as underemployment, are considered; when about four million families have their homes in foreclosure; and when workers’ earnings (adjusted for inflation) are less than they were 10 years ago, that is a huge problem for the country.

I understand why the so-called “mobs” in New York, Denver and other cities are protesting the system. If the blowhard radio critics don’t get it, it’s because the system is their system.

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.”

Oh, poor baby.

Here’s what Hoffa said:

“President Obama, this is your army, we are ready to march. But everybody here’s got to vote. If we go back, and we keep the eye on the prize, let’s take these son-of-a-bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.”

The statement, obviously, refers to taking them, the SOBs, out at the ballot box. Hoffa reaffirmed his Detroit comments later in Denver; he just said it a bit differently: “Our members will all have to vote in 2012 if we are going to take these anti-worker politicians out of office.”

Regardless of how you want to read it, Hoffa is the first labor leader to actually take off the gloves.

More of them should.

The voters will decide in 2012 whether or not Jim Hoffa was correct in his characterization of Tea Party Republicans as sons of bitches.

I bet they’ll side with Hoffa.

Gov. Hickenlooper commented last week that President Obama would have a hard time winning in Colorado in 2012. He cited dissatisfaction among voters over the high unemployment rate.

Republicans were so delighted, they almost wet themselves. John Andrews, former Colorado state senate president, was among the giddy.

If a Republican defeats Obama in 2012, Andrews wrote in the Denver Post, “Americans will have decided it’s grab the wheel or crash. The leadership reversal . . . would simply be the culmination of a citizenship resurgence that began a year or two ago,” he said, referring to the emergence of the Tea Party. He believes the Tea Party is a so-called “responsibility movement” that will challenge both political parties to do the right thing.

What a crock.

Andrews’ Tea Party pals believe that castrating the middle class is the road to a successful economy. Actually, it would be a disaster. You simply cannot diminish the consumer buying power of the middle class and have a viable economy. Third World economies don’t work. They make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Moreover, the Tea Party is a small slice of the conservative base of the Republican Party, and its narrow ideology will never allow it to be much more than that.

Fortunately, there is the emergence of a real “responsibility movement,” which could have a great and beneficial effect on our nation: It is the trade union movement and it could save the nation’s middle class.

Largely ignored by the press, the nation’s unions continue to turn out thousands of members at pro-worker demonstrations in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and other states where labor is under attack by Republican governors and legislators.

Union volunteers in Wisconsin collected petitions required to qualify six Democratic state senate candidates to oppose Republican incumbents in a November recall election. Democrats need only win three of these seats to thwart Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-middle class agenda.

In a counter recall move, Republican candidates tried to challenge seven Democratic incumbents. Six failed to make the ballot and one was beaten decisively in July by an incumbent senator who is a longtime Teamster.

Ohio’s John Kasich is another very unpopular governor. Mostly union volunteers recently gathered nearly 1.3 million signatures when only 231,149 were required to place an initiative on the Ohio ballot in November that will repeal Kasich’s anti-collective bargaining law.

Walker and Kasich aren’t the only Republican governors sinking in the polls. GOP governors in Florida, Michigan, Maine and New Hampshire are all becoming victims of their own war on the middle class.

In addition, 14 right-to-work proposals were introduced in state legislatures this year. Only one state (New Hampshire) passed it, but the bill was vetoed by the governor. Apparently, the union busters failed to learn from Colorado where voters overwhelmingly defeated a right-to-work ballot initiative in 2008.

Apathetic union and non-union workers have failed for the past 20 years to realize that stagnant wages, the unfettered use of strikebreakers, an indifferent mainstream press and betrayal by many of their so-called friends in the Democratic Party were recognized as signs of weakness by those who want to destroy labor.

But after the sneak attacks on unions this year in so many states, workers are waking up.

They are finally realizing what is at stake in the War on Workers, and they are volunteering for duty by the thousands.

This is the real “responsibility movement.”

I have been around the political scene for more years than I can remember, and I can’t recall a time when there was more polarization. I also can’t remember a time when the personal wealth—such as it is—of the nation’s middle class was more at risk.

When I began writing this piece, Moody’s had just issued a warning that the United States might lose its Triple A credit rating if Congress doesn’t pass legislation increasing the nation’s debt limit before an Aug. 2 deadline.

You know the story. Republicans, who have voted to raise the debt limit many times in the past (seven times during the George W. Bush presidency), now say they won’t vote to raise it this year without accompanying spending cuts, namely in Social Security and Medicare.

Democrats won’t vote for that. They’d rather raise taxes on the rich or close tax loopholes. President Obama wants some sort of combination of both, which is probably the most responsible way to solve the problem. Shared sacrifice, they call it.

I believe it when most of the nation’s economists tell us that if we default on our debt, everyone in the world—including you and me—will suffer.

In the Great Recession of 2008, I lost most of a piddling SEP retirement account I had been paying into for several years. My wife lost a third of her 401k.

Many of you are probably familiar with the dreadful, nauseous feeling that overcomes a person who wakes up in the morning to find he has lost much of his/her retirement security. You also know of the depression that subsequently sets in after you realize the ramifications of your loss.

I believe those in charge will find a way to solve the debt crisis, but I still don’t trust them. When one side is totally financed by the richest people and most powerful corporations in the world, and the other side is partially financed by the same guys, how can you possibly trust any of them?

If they don’t come to their senses soon, buckle up; it’s going to be a rough ride.

Keep your eye on the Democrats during the ongoing debate over the future of Medicare.

Some of the so-called “blue dog” Democrats have already indicated they might consider certain aspects of the Republican plan advanced by Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Ryan’s plan would replace Medicare with a phony voucher plan that would only benefit the insurance companies while severely limiting health care for seniors.

It ought to be a certainty that Democratic lawmakers who support any semblance of such a plan will face a primary election opposition in the next election cycle. If anti-worker Republicans can convince nominal Democrats to support them on this issue, it will be a major factor in the eventual purge of the nation’s middle class.

It wouldn’t surprise anyone if certain Democrats try to convince constituents that the Ryan plan can be tinkered with enough that it might really work.

That’s BS; don’t let them get away with it

Democratic constituents around the country — including every rank-and-file union member — ought to demand a commitment from their lawmakers that they will not tinker with the basic structure of Medicare.

Here in Colorado, we’ve heard Mark Udall say he will work to preserve Medicare. We can’t give Senator Udall high marks for specificity, but will give him a passing grade for the time being.

Senator Bennet’s recent statement, though, should raise eyebrows. He said we “must redesign our entitlement programs,” whatever that means.

It’s time to find out.

The vicious attack on workers being carried out in states throughout the country is a hard lesson for America’s rank-and-file union members about the dangers of putting anti-worker candidates in control of state governments.

The lesson: Trade unionists flirt with disaster when they fail to vote in their own best interest.

In November, voters in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Indiana, Florida and several smaller states elected an anti-labor gang of governors and like-minded state legislators who now control a majority of states. Many of the new legislators were Tea Party members, some of whom are in the forefront of the attack on labor.

Most of these states have historically been good labor states, with a high density of union members in the workplace. Obviously, many of those workers voted for candidates who promised them everything except the good wages, hours, working conditions, benefits and job security offered by their union jobs. Polls show the workers fell for it.

When they were campaigning, anti-labor gang members didn’t tell the electorate they would wage a campaign to destroy the unions after they were elected. But union leaders knew better; they warned the nation’s workers, but nobody was listening.

And now the Republican governors and legislators are trying to do what union leaders predicted: destroy the labor movement.

Without unions–which set compensation standards for all workers, union and nonunion—wages will plummet, benefits will be nonexistent and job security will be wishful thinking. And–pity the miners and others who work in dangerous fields–there will be no standards for occupational safety and health.

Eventually the U.S. workforce will become a Third World workforce. And that is the goal of the billionaires, millionaires and corporations.

The excuse the union-busters hide behind in their scurrilous attack on workers is that their states face huge budget deficits and they must reduce state expenditures.

Hogwash.

Workers aren’t the villains in the country’s economic mess by any stretch of the imagination. Wall Street money manipulators are the real culprits, and they have been bailed out by the taxpayers, which includes the country’s workforce.

The attack on public sector unions is on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers only because they make the most convenient target for cash-strapped states.

But the anti-labor gang is really after all unions.

Private sector unions are also being targeted throughout the country. Right-to-work and/or paycheck deception proposals are being introduced in several states. Project labor agreements and prevailing wage laws are also under siege.

So the anti-worker campaign is not simply an attack on public sector unions. It covers both public and private sector unions. If they manage to get one, they are likely to get the other.

If they do, they will have completed the most effective assault ever on the standard of living of the nation’s middle class.

The stakes for the American worker is are as high as they’ve ever been. The time is now for America’s workers get off the couch, switch off the television and join the fight for a secure future.