Midlands Voices: Unionization not to blame for Great Recession

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.omaha.com/article/20110319/NEWS0802/703199878

Published Saturday March 19, 2011

By Al Mumm

The writer, of Waterloo, Neb., is president of the Local 7290 Retirees Chapter of the Communications Workers of America.


The fiscal challenges facing Nebraska and most other states are indeed serious. But let’s be glad we’re not Texas.

Texas has a $27 billion, two-year budget deficit that it cannot blame on state workers unions or collective bargaining. They are both illegal in that state.

Contrary to the opinion of a vocal minority, the real cause of that financial disaster facing government at every level is not unionization. Our public servants are the glue that binds our government together, who teach our children, who protect and serve our families. These public servants do all of this for middle-of-the-road wages.

The real villains behind the Great Recession are the same people who are fashioning the jobless recovery that is slowly killing Main Street businesses. These are literally the “best and brightest” minds working in the cloistered offices on Wall Street and behind the boardroom doors of the nation’s too-big-to-fail financial institutions.

In their brilliance, they have treated our economy as if it were their own personal casino. They gambled heavily on maximizing short-term profits in an underregulated economy, and they lost nearly one-fifth of our country’s economic muscle.

Nevertheless, opponents of collective bargaining are trying to convince the public that it is the unions that are at fault.

We see the misplaced blame at work in Wisconsin. There, Gov. Scott Walker is not trying to do what is best for all citizens in his state but, rather, is following a narrow ideological agenda and seeking to turn Wisconsin into Texas.

For weeks now, Gov. Walker has had in hand all of the financial concessions he sought from public-sector unions, yet he continues to attack the very concept of collective bargaining itself. The governor seems incapable of taking “yes” for an answer.

The action taken by the Wisconsin Senate on March 9 to abolish the rights of the state’s public-sector workers to collectively bargain proved what we in the labor movement have known all along — that the aim was to destroy collective bargaining and had nothing to do with the state budget. In fact, the action by that body was possible only because it did not affect the budget.

Thank goodness that’s not the case in Nebraska. Currently, the Legislature’s Business and Labor Committee is considering a wide range of potential solutions, from a Wisconsin-type overreaction to more reasoned proposals fashioned by those from both labor and management — those who understand the advantages of the Commission of Industrial Relations and know what and where any fixable flaws may lie.

One thing is certain: The answer is not to eliminate the voice that unions and collective bargaining give employees in their workplace.

For while most Nebraskans may never join a union, the wages and benefits every Nebraskan receives are what they are because a group of brave souls gathered to form a union to stand up for what they believe is right, fair and just.

For that, we should all be grateful.

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

1. See the DVD Inside Job. Yes it was Wall Street.