What’s happening in Wisconsin is becoming impressive. For over two weeks now, protests – and protests being driven by that holiest of grails to Washington political analysts, working-class white men. Including firemen, cops, and even a few Green Bay Packers. When the NFL lines up on one side of Wisconsin, best not to be on the other side.
The thumbnail version, as I understand it: new governor rides into town and puts the budget on tilt-a-whirl with a bunch of tax cuts. Gov now needs to balance the budget, because states can’t run a deficit like the Feds can. Gov insists on massive cuts in salary and benefits for public employees, along with the elimination of collective bargaining. Public employ unions concede givebacks on salary and benefits but balk at eliminating collective bargaining. Gov says not negotiable. Hilarity ensues.
One of the first things to get out of the way is the notion that government workers are smoking $100 bills and riding home on golden rickshaws being pulled by poor benighted entrepreneurs. As somebody who has taken Uncle Sam’s nickel before – however indirectly – and was raised on a pair of public-sector incomes, I can assure you that you’ll never have to worry about the AMT on a government salary. The benefits may be better in some cases, but that tends to manifest itself less in terms of “look at all this annual leave” and more in “look how secure I will be in my retirement.” That was the deal in Alabama, at least – much better to be a retired teacher than a working one, because you take less now in order to lay up treasures for the day when you’re out on the lake with a line in the water. (If you’re blessed to live that long. Which is not promised to you.)
The thing is, what public employee unions have now is what everyone used to have – 8 hour shifts, defined-benefit pensions, something approximating job security. They don’t have some sort of unique extra privilege – they’re just the last ones to get the shaft because the government doesn’t have to meet quarterly expectations of increased shareholder value. The public sector decided long ago that 9-to-5 would become 8-to-5, because they’re not paying you to eat, and instead of being responsible for a pension they’ll match some of what you choose to save yourself, and you can invest it and become a money manager on top of whatever else you do, and if it’s necessary to dump some jobs to make the books balance next quarter and “strategically re-engineer our optimal resource portfolio” well then let ’em rip. Two week notice not necessary, because somebody might come back with a shotgun. And the only reason this hasn’t long since happened to public employees is because governments had to play strictly by the black-letter law on employee organizing and collective bargaining, and as a result were faced with unions that wouldn’t allow their managers to balance the books on the backs of the rank-and-file.
Consider Alabama – no public employee unions there, no sir, just a very powerful lobbying group that gets called the “teacher’s union” to help rile up the voters when the time comes, because the old steelworkers and mineworkers just aren’t that numerous anymore. Non-union labor through and through, with payroll to match – and a persistent bottom-five ranking among states in the quality of education, egged on by a religious philosophy that encourages you not to lay up treasures in this world because you’re getting milk and honey and fried catfish in Heaven for all eternity. (Which is apparently not a good enough deal for the assorted Big Mules whose treasure on Earth accumulates yearly thanks to current-use property tax law, but that’s neither here nor there.)
When you get right down to it, part of the problem in the United States is that over the last thirty years our “skilled labor” field transitioned from manufacturing to services. And when the American worker took off his hard hat and sat down in front of a computer, he forgot he was labor, and the notion that people in offices wearing nice white button-up shirts would need a union was generally thought to be incorrect at best and risible at worst. And as the economy hollowed out more and more, people got wedged into either white-collar services or blue-collar work that was sufficiently undifferentiated that unionization was impractical. And now, unemployment is sitting at 9%, and you can pretty much do what you like with your employees, because it’s a buyer’s market for labor pretty much everywhere.
Globalization has kind of made a hell of a mess. All you have to do is look through the old clothes I’m sorting through as part of the wife’s spring cleaning surge. Old MLB caps made in America, old shirts made in Turkey, and all of them ten to fifteen years old – with their modern equivalents almost uniformly sourced from what is still technically a Communist rival. John McCain thinks iPhones and iPads are made in America – hell, the last place not called China that made any Apple product was itself in Cork, Ireland. This is something that a lot of people seem to just now be waking up to: we don’t make much of anything in America anymore.
Now: outsource your manufacturing to China, your programming to Hyderabad, and before long your X-Ray and MRI reading to Chennai, and pretty soon you see where things wind up: one big smear of economy across the entire world, differentiated only by real estate holdings, and you see that Neal Stephenson mostly nailed it twenty years ago – the only thing America does best are movies, music, programming, and high-speed pizza delivery. And even those aren’t a mortal lock for the future.
Which is why those folks are holed up in Wisconsin: they’re the last ones fighting the future. And I say good on ’em. Not all futures are bright.