Union-busting? We should all hope so.
The argument for public unionization wasn’t moral, economic or intellectual. It was rankly political.
Traditional organized labor, the backbone of the Democratic Party, was beginning to lose ground. As Daniel DiSalvo wrote in “The Trouble with Public Sector Unions,” in the fall issue of National Affairs, JFK saw how in states such as New York and Wisconsin, where public unions were already in place, local liberal pols benefited politically and financially. He took the idea national.
The plan worked. Public union membership skyrocketed and government union support for the party of government skyrocketed with it. From 1989 to 2004, AFSCME – the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees – gave nearly $40 million to candidates in federal elections, with 98.5% going to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Why would local government unions give so much in federal elections? Because government workers have an inherent interest in boosting the amount of federal tax dollars their local governments get. Put simply, people in the government business support the party of government.
And this gets to the real insidiousness of government unions. Wisconsin labor officials fairly note that they’ve acceded to many of their governor’s specific demands – that workers contribute to their pensions and healthcare costs, for example. But they don’t want to lose the right to collective bargaining.
But that is exactly what they need to lose.
Private sector unions fight with management over an equitable distribution of profits. Government unions negotiate with politicians over taxpayer money, putting the public interest at odds with union interests and, as we’ve seen in states such as California and Wisconsin, exploding the cost of government. The labor-politician negotiations can’t be fair when the unions can put so much money into campaign spending. Victor Gotbaum, a leader in the New York City chapter of AFSCME, summed up the problem in 1975 when he boasted, “We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.”
This is why FDR believed that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” and why even George Meany, the first head of the AFL-CIO, held that it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”
As it turns out, it’s not impossible; it’s just terribly unwise.
And terribly destructive. But it’s funny in its way; wonder what slogan the Left is going to come up with to pithily describe their war against taxpayers here? They gonna start referring to the “greedy fatcats” they’re assaulting and robbing as “Big Citizen” or something? “Big Wallet,” maybe? Are We The People now to be considered another loathsome special interest, to be vilified and denounced by the leeches who are sucking us all dry?
Yeah, I know. Probably best not to even try to answer that one. No doubt we’ll find out all too soon.







