The Wall Street Journal very predictably supports the public sector union-busting efforts of the Wisconsin Republican Party and their novice governor. To them, all these protestors are just like the unwashed Greeks and Frenchies who take to the streets whenever their betters try to turn the economic screws on them. One point they make is that Franklin Roosevelt opposed public service unions.
Salon has an interesting interview with Georgetown professor Joseph McCartin about the history and development of unionized government workers in the 1950’s. He argues that FDR would have changed his mind and supported collective bargaining for government workers because the practice came to be seen as good government in the post-war era. He’s probably right, but I don’t want to argue that point. The more interesting part of the interview is about why people initially supported public service unions and now are much less happy about them.
SALON: But what about the key difference between private sector and public sector unions? Private sector unions are bargaining for a share of a company’s profits. But in the public sector … the government is a nonprofit. You’re bargaining for a share of the taxpayer’s pocketbook?
McCARTY: It’s a significant difference and it is a difference that entails certain political sensitivities. It’s easier for the public to support a striking auto worker than it is a striking sanitation worker who is not picking up your trash. However, if you look at the rise of public sector unions throughout the ’60s and up through the mid ’70s, there was general public sympathy for them and that sympathy grew out of the fact that when you looked closely you could see that public sector workers were not paid as much as their counterparts in the private sector, and especially when you compared them to private sector union workers, they lagged behind.
SALON: That same sympathy doesn’t seem to be as widespread today. What changed?
McCARTY: A lot of this was really produced by the events of the last few years. There was a tremendous loss in the stock market that left a lot of pension funds looking underfunded, and that set off a lot of alarms in people. Now I’m not going to say that there aren’t some workers in some places that have gotten some pensions that aren’t really fully justifiable but that is different than saying that the whole principle of collective bargaining is wrong.
But an even more important factor is basically a 20- or 30-year period of failure in the private sector. What we are really looking at here is a private sector that for quite a long time now has not generated a lot of rising income for the great majority. It has not generated stable benefits for its workers, it has not generated increasing retirement security — in fact we’ve had income stagnation or decline, we’ve had rising indebtedness, we’ve had growing insecurity for retirement. The private sector has failed on a massive level. And the tenuous position that so many American workers find themselves in as a result of that now makes it suddenly appear that public sector workers are just living off the fatted calf. I think some of it has to do quite simply with the way in which so many nongovernment workers have been suffering, and legitimately so. You can go to those folks and say: Why are you paying for the pension of the guy down the street? You don’t have one!
SALON: That seems to be a real political liability for public sector unions.
McCARTY: It is a real liability, but it is liability that is not the result of union munificence, or that came from squeezing the taxpayers; it is a liability that basically flows from the fact that the private sector has done so poorly at creating a really broad growing thriving middle class in the past 20 years. And without a broad growing, thriving middle class, government workers are increasingly isolated and increasingly under threat and it is easy to play the dynamic this way, unfortunately for them.
So, prior to the Reagan Revolution, people in the private sector could tell that teachers, social workers, firefighters, police, and civil servants were getting screwed because they couldn’t collectively negotiate their contracts. But now it looks like they are getting a sweet deal at the taxpayer’s expense. To the degree that that is true, it isn’t because government workers are better off. It’s because everyone else is getting screwed. And why is that? The fact that the power of unions has waned under sustained Republican assault is one of the most important reasons. Obviously, increased global competition is another.
The Republicans are trying to destroy a major wing of the U.S. labor movement, and they’re likely to succeed.
