In states across the country, elected officials and right-wing pundits are calling not just for cuts to wages and benefits in the name of austerity, but even proposing laws to undermine labor unions’ influence, and in fact, their very existence. We host a roundtable discussion with New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse; Michael Zweig of the Center for Study of Working Class Life; and Art Levine of the Washington Monthly. [includes rush transcript–partial]
Steven Greenhouse, labor and workplace reporter for the New York Times and author of The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.
Michael Zweig, Professor of economics and director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is author of What’s Class Got to Do with It? and The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret.
Art Levine, contributing editor at Washington Monthly, he also writes regularly on labor, health, financial and other reform issues at the "Working In These Times" blog, Truthout.org, and the Huffington Post.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Today we look at how the recession’s squeeze on state governments will impact the nation’s unions and public sector workers nationwide. In states across the country, elected officials and right-wing pundits are calling not just for cuts to wages and benefits in the name of austerity, but even proposing laws to undermine labor unions’ influence—and, in fact, their very existence.
New census figures released Wednesday show state revenues declined by nearly 31 percent in 2009, a $1.1 trillion loss. Underperforming investments by state pension funds and declining tax revenues were cited as the primary causes for the falling revenues.
Nicholas Johnson, director of the State Fiscal Project at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told the Washington Post that next year will mark, quote, "the most difficult budget year for states ever." A recent study by the group found that 40 states have projected budget gaps totaling $113 billion for next year. Forty-six states have raised taxes and made deep cuts to close a combined budget gap of $130 billion.
In his first "State of the State address" on Wednesday, the newly inaugurated governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, declared a fiscal crisis. Pledging to make, quote, New York "a business-friendly state," Cuomo ruled out additional borrowing to pay down the deficit and called for a one-year freeze on public sector wages.
GOV. ANDREW CUOMO: We have to start with an emergency financial plan to stabilize our finances. We need to hold the line, and we need to institute a wage freeze in the state of New York. We need to hold the line on taxes. We need a state spending cap. And we need to close this $10 billion gap without any borrowing.JUAN GONZALEZ: A number of other states are facing even greater threats to the public sector. The Ohio governor-elect, John Kasich, wants to ban teachers’ strikes and prevent child care and home care workers from unionizing. Kasich discussed his views on striking and binding arbitration last month.
GOV.-ELECT JOHN KASICH: We’ll come up with a series of changes, but binding arbitration is not acceptable. You are forcing increased taxes on taxpayers, with them having no say, by people who are—come from a faraway place that have no accountability to the taxpayers.
REPORTER: To just make sure I’m clear, you do not think police and fire, emergency services, should have the right to strike.
GOV. JOHN KASICH: I really don’t favor the right to strike of any public employee, OK? That’s my personal philosophy. How practical that is to implement—you know, but my personal philosophy is I don’t like public employees striking. OK? I mean, they’ve got good jobs. They’ve got high pay. They’ve got good benefits, a great retirement. What are they striking for?AMY GOODMAN: That was Ohio Governor John Kasich.
We’re joined now by Steven Greenhouse, the labor and workplace reporter for the New York Times, the author of the book The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. This week he wrote a piece for the New York Times that begins, quote, "Faced with growing budget deficits and restive taxpayers, elected officials from Maine to Alabama, Ohio to Arizona, are pushing new legislation to limit the power of labor unions, particularly those representing government workers, in collective bargaining and politics."
Welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you take it from there, Steven? Explain what’s happening, this attack on especially public sector unions and workers.
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: So, many states face large budget deficits, and we’re seeing two different strategies by governors and legislators. One is trying to get, you know, public sector unions to agree to wage freezes or to agree to less expensive pensions. Now, with Republicans capturing many, many state houses, many more state houses last November, we’re seeing another thing, where Republican governors—John Kasich in Ohio, Scott Walker in Wisconsin—they’re really taking aim at the unions, not just to get them to trim wages, but to really try to weaken them. And they’re trying to push through real institutional structural changes that will weaken unions long term.
Scott Walker, the new governor, new Republican governor of Wisconsin, has talked about ending the right of state employees to unionize and bargain collectively. Ten seconds of history: the National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, protects the right of private sector workers to unionize, and each state kind of decides on its own whether to give government workers the right to unionize. And most states in the Midwest, the Northeast, definitely do that, and many in the South and Southwest do, as well. But it’s unusual that in a labor-friendly or traditionally labor-friendly state like Wisconsin, we’re seeing the new governor wanting to basically strip government workers of collective bargaining rights.
And in Ohio, Kasich is really going to war against the unions. You know, as we just saw, he wants to take away the right to bargain for child care workers and home care workers and end binding arbitration and end teachers’ right to strike. And I interviewed a professor at Ohio State, who said, "Well, if you don’t give public employees the right to strike, you absolutely should give them binding arbitration, to try to maintain some modicum of fairness in the system, because if you can’t strike and you don’t get arbitration, management could really squeeze unions very hard."
But, you know, even more fundamentally, many people in the union movement are saying that these newly empowered Republicans are really trying to chop labor off at the knees. And they saw last November the nation’s labor unions spending tens of millions, you know, even more than $200, $300 million, trying to elect Democrats. And to the victor goes the spoils. And the Republicans are now trying to spoil life for unions by taking away their right to bargain. They’re also pushing through several—trying to push through several measures that would make it harder for unions to collect dues money to be used in politics or just to run the unions generally. And I say in my story that, really, at the state level, unions are on the defensive more than they’ve been in 20, 30, 40 years. And unions are very alarmed right now about what’s going on.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Steven, especially the attack, obviously, seems focused more on public sector unions, because basically, the private sector union movement has been essentially decimated now for over decades, and there’s really only the public sector unions have managed to maintain significant membership and influence, isn’t it? And here in New York State, for instance, you have the specter now of the head of the buildings trades union joining a so-called new Committee to Save New York that really is targeting the public sector unions. So you may have a civil war within labor itself as some of these private sector unions defect to these business-labor partnerships. Could you talk about that?
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: Yeah. So, the Wall Street Journal had an editorial yesterday saying there’s a new class war—and get this—you know, between public sector workers—you know, well-paid public sector workers on one side and not-so-well-paid private sector workers on the other side. And, of course, people in labor will say the class war is the folks on Wall Street making a million, two million a year, trying to squeeze private sector workers, trying to squeeze public sector workers. But now we’re seeing some union members, private sector union members, especially in the construction trades, that are really starting—
JUAN GONZALEZ: Or union leaders, you’re saying.
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: Union leaders, yeah, sorry. Union leaders. And the most notable is the head of the New Jersey state senate, Steve Sweeney, who comes out of the iron workers’ union. And he and Gary LaBarbera here in New York City, head of the construction trades, are kind of critical of public sector unions, saying that they’re earning too much, the pensions are too rich, they’re forcing taxes to be too high, they’re hurting the business climate, they’re making it—you know, they’re discouraging businesses from coming to New York and New Jersey, and that’s discouraging construction, and that’s hurting the number of jobs in the construction trades. So that’s the argument. So, I know the AFL-CIO today is having a big meeting of private sector union leaders and public sector union leaders to try to help prevent this—you know, these tensions from getting worse between, you know, private sector union leaders and public sector union leaders. And many union leaders make the argument that private sector unions have been badly weakened, and now conservatives are trying to weaken the one sector of union movement that’s really quite strong, and that’s the public sector unions.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to continue this discussion, but we have to break. Steven Greenhouse, reporter for the New York Times, author of the book The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2011/1/6/crackdown_on_organized_labor_states_call
