Never On Sunday

There’s something that I just can’t wrap my head around concerning the nation-wide assault on public workers’ unions, no matter how hard I try to see things from somebody else’s perspective. I can understand why politicians, especially right-wing politicians, would be eager to cut paychecks in order to balance the budget (or, sadly, to buy more breathing room for wealthy campaign donors without fighting deficits at all). I can understand why wealthy voters would be eager to stop paying for public services; it’s much cheaper to buy their own services and let the rest of the country wither. I can understand why big business would be eager to depress wages generally, and make their own workers more willing to accept what they’ve got rather than leave the private labor pool for better-paying public sector jobs. I can understand why these efforts to break unions would need to be packaged in disingenuous terms for the working stiffs in the private sector—who, after all, comprise our largest voting demographic. What I can’t understand is why the working stiffs are buying the message, no matter how cleverly packaged.

The rallying cry for attacking public workers’ unions is that private sector workers, who largely don’t belong to unions, don’t enjoy the same benefits, nor, increasingly, even the salaries, that unionized public workers do, so public workers’ salaries and benefits should be cut in the interests of fairness.

Now, let’s set aside the independent research that severely harms the assertion that public workers earn more than private workers. They do, but only in comparison to a large, unskilled labor pool flipping burgers. Public servants earn 5% less than non-unionized private-sector employees for identical work, earn 10% less than private sector workers of comparable education levels, and cost 25% less than private contractors for identical work for government needs. Let us imagine, because imagination is the only place where the assertion is true, that (unionized) public workers did indeed make less than (generally non-unionized) private workers for comparable labor.

The natural reaction of the (generally non-unionized) private worker and voter should should be “Hey! How do I get that pay and those benefits myself?”

(The answer of course, is to unionize. By my sources, unionization makes a difference of somewhere between $700 to $900 a month in the paycheck, not to mention less measurable benefits like safer working conditions, shorter working hours, job security, and retirement packages. Union membership has declined steadily since the Reagan revolution, and wages and benefits for all workers, but especially in non-unionized fields, have declined precipitously with membership. The staggering disjoint of wealth distribution since 1980 alone should give strong impetus to re-creating unions.)

But so effective is the right-wing propaganda machine, that the generally non-unionized private worker and voter is asking, “Hey! I don’t have those benefits, or that salary. How can I make sure that guy can’t have them either?”

That’s just crazy talk, spiteful and self-defeating.

An online acquaintance related a bitter joke recently. A banker, a teacher, and a non-union worker are sitting at a table, hungrily eyeing a plate of a dozen cookies. The banker grabs eleven of the cookies, sweeps them into his pocket, then tells the worker, “Watch out for that teacher. She wants to take your cookie.” And no matter how hard I try, I can’t imagine what frame of mind produces the suspicious looks so many conservatives obligingly turn on the teacher.