Labor Unrest in Ohio and Wisconsin

In deciding to go after long-established labor laws, right-wing Republicans and Tea Baggers may have bitten off more than they can chew. Yesterday in Ohio, 3500 demonstrators showed up at the Statehouse, most of them opponents of proposed Senate Bill 5. A similar bill has been introduced in Wisconsin, and yesterday the Democratic minority simply walked out and left Madison.

Some of the more reasonable and fair-minded Ohio Republicans (yes, they exist, although they're an endangered species) have said they feel SB 5 goes too far. No such luck in Wisconsin. Today the Cheesehead Republican leader asked the Highway Patrol to arrest his Democratic counterpart and throw him in jail. Oh, that'll help!

For the record, Buster has never been a member of a union nor has any family member, but I have nothing against unions. I can also understand how, in tough economic times, something might have to give. But we already have a good system in place to address and negotiate those sticky issues. It's called collective bargaining, and it's precisely what the Tea Baggers want to do away with.

Basically what those in favor of these bills are saying is, "We don't want to go to the time or trouble to sit down and renegotiate labor contracts and pay scales and benefits and seniority and pensions and all that stuff, because it's too hard and we don't always get everything we want and an arbitrator might rule against us. It would be quicker and easier to take all those sticky issues and just legislate them out of existence. Then we'll rewrite the law and codify lower pay, less benefits, and lots of anti-union rules."

And that's why these bills are so wrong; that's why it's union-busting. It removes the very possibility of negotiation, and with it the possibility of compromise and even union concessions. (It happens, you know.) These bills say, "Fuck it, we're not even interested in trying -- now or ever again."

I wrote a letter to my state senator Jim Hughes and told that if he truly believed that SB 5 was the way to go then he was a very poor student of history. I suggested that if he and other Republicans wanted more favorable outcomes in collective bargaining, they should learn to make their case more persuasively and learn how to be better negotiators.

So much of this shit is motivated by an odd sour-grapes sentiment expressed by many who support SB 5. Goes like this: "Those damn public employees make more money than I do, have better benefits than I do, and pay less for those benefits than I do. I'm envious. If I could get their deal, I'd shut up and be a happy camper. But because I can't, I'm angry. And my solution is to drag everybody down to my level."

These bills would be bad law. There's gotta be a better way.