by James Boyd

Created on: March 15, 2011

Should state employees have collective bargaining rights? The real question is not whether state employees should have the right to collective bargaining. The real question is whether any employees, no matter whether the employer is public or private, should have the right to bargain collectively. Many people in this country have an unfavorable opinion of labor unions. They think of unionized employees as lazy and overpaid.

Members of unions of public employees get a special dose of antipathy, largely due to pension benefits they have bargained for. This is a curious issue. The employees who negotiated for and obtained the pension provisions are vilified, while the public entity that agreed to provide the benefits is somehow exempted from the anger. States and cities agreed to provide some very good pension benefits for public employees, and then did not do what they knew they had to do to fund them. It is like blaming the seller of a luxury car because the buyer agreed to pay more than he could afford for the car.

Unions had terrible battles in their early years. Not just battles with words and in court; there were many violent confrontations. A lot of union supporters were jailed and many were killed. Companies and factory owners vigorously resisted attempts to organize employees. The successes of organized labor changed the workplace for all of us. Child labor was banned. We got an eight-hour workday, with time-and-a-half paid for overtime. Safety rules were put in place to protect workers from some of the hazards they had previously had to live (or die) with.

The current attack on public unions, which is being pursued in several states, is not really about what some have called “lavish” benefits. In Wisconsin, the governor declared that concessions on health benefits and pensions were necessary in order to manage the budget. The public unions agreed to all the concessions he asked for, but he still insists unions must give up their right to bargain collectively over anything other than wages. This is actually a thinly-veiled assault on all labor unions, public and private. Hard-line conservatives hate labor unions, for reasons most of them probably do not understand. It is part of their creed, and that is all they feel a need to know.

What this really amounts to is the first step in an all-out assault on the middle class. People who actually work for a living are despised by those who worship wealth and those who have it. Anyone with a job should

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