The Impending Violent Demise of Unions

[Modern School]

In 1981, Reagan fired the striking PATCO air traffic controllers, imprisoning many. Spain had a similar response this year when their airport workers went on strike, forcing them back to work at gunpoint and imprisoning those who refused. While the justification in all these cases was that the strikes were a threat to public safety, national security or the smooth functioning of government, the real reason was always to secure profits. Now Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin says he’ll call up the National Guard if state employees fail to show up for work in response to his austerity budget proposal. (Imagine how dangerous it would be if Wisconsin teachers and government employees failed to come to work for even a day.)

Obviously, when politicians make such threats, they realize that they have already provoked us with something terrible and outrageous. Walker understands that he is about to make the people of Wisconsin pay for the greed of its bankers and CEOs and he also realizes that they are unlikely to accept it passively. And they shouldn’t. Threats like this should be immediately and aggressively opposed by all workers, and not just in Wisconsin. For those who say his threats are just posturing, think again: he says he has beefed up the National Guard in anticipation of civil unrest.

The Daily Censored sees Walker’s threat as a move toward fascism, comparing him to Mussolini and Pinochet. Similar references to fascism were published in The World Socialist Website, when Zapatero brought in the military and forced air traffic controllers back to work at gunpoint in December.

Cries of fascism are starting to seem reasonable with the Patriot Act and the rise of Brown Shirt tactics by Tea Baggers, militias, and anti-immigrant activists. However, Walker’s move is consistent with how capitalism has always operated, including in the freedom loving U.S.: whenever “nice” methods fail to keep wages low and regulations favorable to the ruling elite, then legal, police and military threats are used. It is easy for Americans to not see this, as state violence against workers has been relatively light over the past sixty years.

To read the complete article, please go to http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/02/impending-violent-demise-of-unions.html

[xchrom]

1. wow -- the write has their historical dominos lined up there. recommend. nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. labor will have to dig deep onto it's history

and take an example from oh Egypt

[still_one]

3. And the ultimate irony is that a lot of labor voted for reagan /nt

[Omaha Steve]

5. Reagan had been a D and president of SAG

Some unions endorsed him!

K&R!

[patrice]

4. There is NO one and NOTHING there for Labor except itself. This means that Labor

will ALWAYS get dry-frakked because shit flows downhill and they ARE at the bottom of that hill even more so now than they have been for a while and NO ONE is going to do anything about that FOR them. What's going to happen IS necessary.