Downsize The Carrot, Outsource The Stick

I’ll leave it to the economists among you (hello? Beuller?) to deconstruct the facts and assumptions here, but David Sirota argues emphatically against the administration’s animosity toward American labor (both as organized and as protected under law). (He intros this SF Chronical op-ed–excerpted below–at his diary on the Daily Kos):

…Bashing organized labor is a Republican pathology, to the point where unions are referenced with terms reserved for military targets. In his 1996 article, headlined “GOP Readies for War With Big Labor,” conservative columnist Robert Novak cheered the creation of a “GOP committee task force on the labor movement” that would pursue a “major assault” on unions. As one Republican lawmaker told Novak, GOP leaders champion an “anti-union attitude that appeals to the mentality of hillbillies at revival meetings.”

The hostility, while disgusting, is unsurprising. Unions wield power for workers, meaning they present an obstacle to Republican corporate donors, who want to put profit-making over other societal priorities.

Think the minimum wage just happened? Think employer-paid health care and pensions have been around for as long as they have by some force of magic? Think again — unions used collective bargaining to preserve these benefits. As the saying goes, union members are the folks that brought you the weekend.

The government’s numbers explain how unions have helped their members. According to an analysis of federal data by the Labor Research Association, average union members receive a quarter more in compensation than nonunion workers. Eighty-nine percent of union members have access to employer-sponsored health care, compared to just 67 percent of nonunion workers. Unionized workers receive 26 percent more vacation than nonunion workers.

…

Big Business claims union membership has declined because workers do not want to join unions — a claim debunked by public-opinion data. In 2002, Harvard University and University of Wisconsin researchers found at least 42 million workers want to be organized into a bargaining unit — more than double the 16 million unionized workers in America. A 2005 nationwide survey by respected pollster Peter Hart found 53 percent of nonunion workers — that’s more than 50 million people — want to join a union, if given the choice.

Increasingly, however, workers have no real choice. According to Cornell University experts, 1 in 4 employers illegally fires at least one worker during a union drive, 3 in 4 hire anti-union consultants, and 8 in 10 force workers to attend anti-union meetings. …

So when GOP lawmakers pledge their commitment to workers at Labor Day celebrations today, remember — Republicans are waging a war on the very workers they purport to care about.

There are a lot of inherent assumptions here (Is the polling data accurate? Are the stats all accurate? Are the conclusions really logical throughout?). But the general attitude of neoconservative leaders toward labor unions isn’t much in question. It’s more an issue of how they’ll be attempting to dismantle them, rather than if.

Counter arguments and editorials welcome, as always.

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