This is a question that often puzzles me. Perhaps it is as P.T. Barnum famously said so long ago: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
The P. T. Barnums of our time include Sara Palin,
and Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, unions are under unprecedented attack across the country. This initiative, most visible and confrontational in Wisconsin and Ohio, led the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees to scream,
The radical proposals by the governors in Wisconsin and Ohio would not just gut public services and jobs, they would take away the rights of workers to collectively bargain and the basic freedom to join a union — effectively eliminating public employee unions. the goals of these efforts are simple: reduce the tax bills of the ultra-rich, privatize public services and deflect blame away from corporations for the reckless behavior that caused the economy to tank. We’ve seen what has happened to workers in the private sector. We're not going to let it happen in the public sector. This race to the bottom has got to end, for the sake of all middle-class families in America.
These governors got elected promising to focus on jobs, and instead they are settling political scores. They may win a short-term victory, but the people will eventually reject their reactionary policies.
[http://www.afscme.org/]
The stakes for organized labor are enormously high. The final three decades of the 20th century saw Big Labor’s representation of private-sector employees erode from 1:3 in the 1950s and 1960s to less than 1:10 by the close of the last millennium. Public sector unionization has kept the American labor movement alive. A Bureau of Labor Statistics January 21, 2011, news release succinctly summarizes organized labor’s current situation:
In 2010, the union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were
members of a union--was 11.9 percent, down from 12.3 percent a year earlier, the U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers be-
longing to unions declined by 612,000 to 14.7 million. In 1983, the first year for
which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 per-
cent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.
The data on union membership were collected as part of the Current Population Sur-
vey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 households that obtains informa-
tion on employment and unemployment among the nation's civilian noninstitutional
population age 16 and over. For more information see the Technical Note.
Highlights from the 2010 data:
--The union membership rate for public sector workers (36.2 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private sector workers (6.9 percent).
--Workers in education, training, and library occupations had the highest unionization rate at 37.1 percent.
--Black workers were more likely to be union members than were white, Asian, or Hispanic workers.
--Among states, New York had the highest union membership rate (24.2 percent) and North Carolina had the lowest rate (3.2 percent).
[http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm]
As America's rich become ver richer... as the middle class struggles to hold onto what it has... as our recent college grads struggle to find "real" jobs commensurate with their educations and credentials, and to repay their loans, commonsense would seem to suggest a stampede to unionism.
As I have previously pointed out in this space, the current concerted attack on the great public-employee unions has an even broader strategic purpose:
Substantial as the stakes may be for Big Labor, they are even higher for Mr. Obama and his party. This is all because of a January 2010 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,130 S.Ct. 876 (2010) in which a majority of the Supremes held:
(1) the government may not, under the First Amendment, suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker's corporate identity, overruling Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U.S. 652, 110 S.Ct. 1391, 108 L.Ed.2d 652; and,
(2) the federal statute barring independent corporate expenditures for electioneering communications violated First Amendment, overruling McConnell v. Federal Election Com'n, 540 U.S. 93, 124 S.Ct. 619, 157 L.Ed.2d 491.
While the GOP enjoys the support of numerous corporations, which were freed from restraints on the levels of financial support they can funnel to Republican candidates, the Democrats have far fewer such super-supporters. Big Labor is, as always, the biggest of the big donors on the Democratic side of the political divide. Thus, destruction of the powerful public-sector unions, which are the backbone of Big Labor, would be a blow not only to their millions of members, but to the Democratic Party, as well.
Marshall McLuhan observed in the 1960s that Americans viewed life through a rear-view mirror. Their heads were still in "Bonanza Land," i.e., the wild, wild west.
With an additional 100 million people since McLuhan said that, we are ven farther away from our frontier roots. Yet we continue to resist government reform of our wasteful, inequitable healthcare system; taxes that fairly dun the top 1%; elimination of loopholes and subsidies for the rich and powerful.
The prosperity of the 1950s was due in no small part to the great labor unions. What's happening today? Check it out here: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph
Or here:
Or here:ttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/05/us-inequality-infographic_n_845042.html#s261411&title=Wage_Inequality
It might have taken a near-historic recession for many Americans to notice our country's rapidly rising levels of income inequality, but the gap between rich and poor has finally gone mainstream, with bloggers, economists and policymakers of all stripes spouting theories on why we should or shouldn't care.
And while the debate continues over cause and consequence, that central claim has proven unshakable: the gulf between the wealth of America's richest and poorest is widening, and few signs show any indication of it slowing.
"Economists are not sure how to fully explain the growing inequality in America," Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in a new piece for Vanity Fair this week. "But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way."
Beyond the issue of income distribution is the broader one of democracy. Personally, I doubt that Facebook and Twitter will take the place of the great labor unions as engines of democracy... never mind the blarny coming out of the Arab world these days.
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