The end of labor as we know it

I’ve been trying to decide what to write in response to last night’s benefit vote, but I realized that I’d pretty much said what I needed to say a few days ago. Here it is.

To sum things up: The benefits bill strips public workers of important elements of their collective bargaining rights, unilaterally altering existing contracts without offering them any compensation in return. The vote was a political maneuver that continued the scapegoating of public workers and should signal to organized labor that its affiliation with the Democrats has left it vulnerable. It leaves every worker at the mercy of management.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

One thought on “The end of labor as we know it”

  1. The war against unions has been going on since Reagan got the ball rolling with the firing of the air traffic controllers. Although, I guess the war against unions has been never ending and ongoing in this country. But at least before Reagan, unions held a decent percentage of the workforce now it's down to 11.9% of the workforce (Finland has an 80%+ unionization rate). In the past couple of years, the war against unions has gone into high gear, it's almost like a shark feeding frenzy upon the body of the union movement. The GOP is rabidly anti-union and the Democrats are halfheartedly not anti-union, sort of. Both parties have been bought off by the corporations, the GOP has always been hostile to unions while the Democrats historically have been supportive of unions but not so much lately. The benefits bill is a travesty against unions, it guts collective bargaining rights and it eliminates the COLA even for current retirees. How is this any different from what went on in Wisconsin? There are enough Democrats like Sweeney and Oliver who betrayed the unions and made the public workers pay the price for the Great Recession and for NJ pols not funding the pension fund. So here we are in 2011: unions are being liquidated, millions are unemployed fighting for part time service jobs with no benefits, no vacations, no pensions, tens of millions without health insurance, defined benefit pensions going the way of the Dodo bird, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security being targeted for elimination, even by the AARP. One wonders when Americans will say enough. Quite the opposite seems to be happening, too many clueless gullible fools support the rich, the corporations and the right wing libertarian propagandists on Fox News and right wing talk radio (of which NJ101.5 is a member). Fringe morons like Ayn Randians, libertarians and far right wingers have gone main stream and have polluted and debased the national debate to the level of total irrational jabberwocky. Please, continue to support Steve Forbes, Grover Norquist, the Koch brothers and Pete Peterson because, you know, they really have your best interests at heart (sarcasm alert).

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