It’s been obvious for a while that when the GOP pines for the good old days of the 1950s, they’re thinking about minorities and women. Segregation, the coloreds in their place, the fruits in the closet, the little woman at home with dinner and a pitcher of martinis for her man when he gets home, the works. It’s nothing to do with things financial, because in the 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was 91%. And more important, one in three American workers belonged to a union.
The union was the safety net, in a way. It was the lookout. It made sure that businesses didn’t balance the budget on the backs of the workers, that you couldn’t be pink-slipped just for the sake of making the stock bounce next quarter, that your working-class job would pay enough that you could put food on the table and a car in the driveway and send the kids to college. And unions took the same thrashing as every other institution took in the 1970s, what with the mob ties to the Teamsters and the Nixonland encouragement of the politics of resentment.
But most of all, the nature of work changed. Work moved into offices, to desks, in front of computers, and the people in those jobs forgot they were workers. You’re indoors at a desk, you’re not blue-collar, you job doesn’t need organizing, unions aren’t for fine upstanding middle-class folk like yourself.
Horseshit.
This idea that the working world is somehow full of white-collar professionals is absurd. Doctors? Lawyers? Engineers? Probably. But look at the tech sector, for instance. My first boss had a marketing degree. My tag-team partner had a doctorate (!) in psychology. My wife’s degree is in environmental science, and famously, I have two degrees in political science that only get used in the service of blogging and trivia night. We took jobs in the tech sector based on what we were mostly self-taught, and worked our way up through the ranks and learned as we went. And unless we were in management, many if not most of us were filling out an hourly timesheet. The senior contractor at my first job, who was essentially the top non-com and the senior enlisted man, was typically sardonic: We’re bit-janitors, he proclaimed, we’re on the same level as general services and security and the maintenance guys. They don’t put our names on our shirts, is all.
He was right. We had college layered over top of high school, but it was for show – when it came time to get a job, we went out and got a job, resemblance to our degree field not required, and played out our careers just the same as if we’d been down at the plant like our grandfathers.
Problem is, people don’t want to think they need a union. They do if they work for the likes of Wal-Mart, but they don’t get it, not anymore. You can be a warehouse picker and basically get wrecked, or do manual labor and have the threat of a truckload of illegals who’ll work for half held over you, or you can take an office job with two weeks’ vacation and sick leave combined and a big chunk out of your paycheck for your HMO coverage, which will get changed next year to whatever’s cheapest for the company, and you’ll get told that there’s 8% unemployment, you’re lucky to have a job, so shut up and get back to work.
The only place that still has unionized labor in any quantity is in government, the last employer that has to play by the rules and observe the letter of the law. It’s not that union labor in government has special privileges, it’s that they’re the last ones to have to give up what everybody used to have. And for the longest time, that was part of the deal if you worked for the city, or the state, or Uncle Sam – you’ll never get rich, but you have the benefits and security of the union to protect you.
And now, that’s going. You can expect Wisconsin to open the floodgates for GOP-controlled legislatures and statehouses around the country: time to break the public-employee unions. Partly because it’ll save money if you can slash salary and benefits without consequence, partly because it’ll hurt traditionally-Democratic organizations, partly because they’re government workers so they’re not REAL Americans, and partly it’s just the dog scratching its nuts.
The greatest trick the Republicans ever pulled off was convincing American workers that somehow they weren’t actually working class, and that they should take the side of the bosses. Social issues may have prized them off, but now it’s just loyalty to the tribe – vote for the Big Mules if you want to be on the side of the Real True Job Creator Americans. And it worked, because there’s an amazing number of Americans who are happy to live on a slab of cardboard under a leaky bridge cooking a dead crow on a car antenna over a fire, just so long as the wetback/homo/feminazi/spade next door doesn’t even have the car antenna.
Don’t get me wrong, I love America. But I pretty much fucking hate Americans.