Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet’s tireless labor reporter, takes an in-depth look at the consequences of stripping public sector workers of their collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and Ohio. These laws sparked national outrage when they were passed. Now the dire predictions are coming true.

Wisconsin and Ohio, where industrial democracy goes to die:

“For all its faults, the National Labor Relations Act established that it is the policy of the US government to encourage collective bargaining,” Jacob Remes, assistant professor of public affairs and history at SUNY Empire State College, told AlterNet. “The New Deal established collective bargaining as a fundamental part of democracy–what they called industrial democracy. We talk about how the New Deal era has ended, but I think one of the great things about these fights is that they reminded people–politicians, pundits, the populace–that despite the decline of the rest of the New Deal, we still believe in at least this element of industrial democracy.”

A typical Wisconsin state employee earning $40,000 a year has seen a wage cut of over $3000. Under the new law, unions must vote to recertify every year and the law stacks the deck against recertification. At least 51% of the workers in each bargaining unit must vote to recertify, 51% of the votes in the election isn’t good enough. In principle, 100% of the voters could vote “yes” and the union would still be decertified if less than 51% of the workers voted.

Without collective bargaining rights, Wisconsin’s teachers are facing increasingly intrusive dress and conduct codes from administrators bent on rooting out “moral turpitude,” a vague term that encompasses everything from wearing jeans and skirts above the knee to “friending” their students on facebook.

Some prison guards have lost their bathroom privileges when they accompany inmates to the hospital.

The assault on the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers is just the beginning. The enemies of labor know that the public sector is the last bastion of high union density in the United States. If the public sector unions are decimated, the labor movement will lose political power and become an less effective advocate for the rights of private sector workers.

[Photo credit: Self-portrait on the first day of the term, by Cathdew, a teacher from the Netherlands. Creative Commons.]

• The new vigilantism: How so-called “stand your ground” laws, championed by the gun lobby, have emboldened racists and crackpots to shoot first and ask questions later. [Facing South]
• How our old friends at the American Legislative Exchange Council are passing bills in state legislatures to gut the climate science curriculum in public schools. What’s next, the Scopes Troposphere Trial? [AlterNet]
• News anchor Diane Sawyer is touting egg-freezing as a means to extend fertility, but the American Society for Reproductive Medicine still classifies the $15,000 procedure as experimental because thawed eggs don’t reliably produce pregnancies and some of the chemicals used in the freezing process may be toxic to embryos. [RH Reality Check]
• The UAW is stepping up its bid to unionize a West Virginia Volkswagon plant, which, if successful, would extend the union’s influence beyond its traditional stronghold in Detroit. [Reuters]

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

• And now for something completely different: Republicans against prison labor! When public exploitation undercuts private profit, something has to be done. Defense contractors say they’re being undercut by Federal Prison Industries, a publicly-owned company that pays inmates between 23 cents to $1.15 an hour to make clothing and other items for the U.S. military, Diane Cardwell reports in the New York Times. The defense contractors have enlisted their friends in the Senate, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), to level the playing field between FPI and the private sector. Now, a bipartisan group of legislators seeks to revive a bill that would raise the minimum wage in federal prisons and increase Congressional oversight of the prison system.
• Why the U.S. needs to bring back the 40-hour work week to preserve our sanity and our productivity, by Sarah Robinson in AlterNet.
• Last week Rush Limbaugh attacked Tracie McMillan, the author of the critically acclaimed book The American Way of Eating as “wide-eyed” “authorette,” and an “overeducated” but unintelligent single woman. Clarissa León takes Rush to task for his ill-informed, sexist, classist diatribe in the Daily Beast: “‘Rush Limbaugh has crystallized something that is bigger than just him,’ writer Annia Ciezadlo says. ‘What he’s sort of unwittingly articulated is this hatred of the idea that working-class women will have a voice in anything that they do.’”
• Former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith quit the legendary investment banking house because he realized that short-term greed was eclipsing long-term greed at Goldman, Ezra Klein explains in the Washington Post. In other words, Smith felt that Goldman was more interested in wringing money out of its own clients (short-term greed) than in making them money and taking a cut year after year (long-term greed).

Young, college-educated workers are shaking up the service sector, Nona Willis Aronowitz reports in GOOD magazine:

Behind the bar of a fancy New York restaurant, a 27-year-old bartender tidies her olive-and-cherry box. She attempts to look distracted while a middle-aged financial analyst holds her captive with small talk.

“So what else do you do?” he slurs, four Manhattans deep.

 

“Nothing,” she says. “I just do this.”

 

“Oh!” he answers. “That’s cool. Did you go to college?”

 

“Yup. I went to NYU.”

 

The man makes no attempt to hide his confusion. She leans forward and wipes away a few whiskey drops in front of him.

 

“I have loans,” she says, with a touch of attitude. “Don’t know what to tell you.”

 

Emily Sanders has been a waitress or bartender, on and off, for almost a decade. She’s made anywhere from minimum wage to around $1,000 a week, which is what she hauls in now. She has no health insurance, no 401(k), and a pathetic savings account. Most days, she gets to her first job at noon and leaves her second after midnight. If she’s sick but a little short on cash, she downs some DayQuil and goes into work anyway.

Willis Aronowitz profiles Erik Forman, a former humanites student at Macalester College who now works as an Industrial Workers of the World organizer in Minneapolis.

Forman played a leading role in a hard-fought but unsuccessful campaign to unionize ten Jimmy Johns sub shops in the Twin Cities.

“People didn’t want to admit that they were going to be in these jobs for a long time,” Erik says. “It’s a classist stereotype that these jobs don’t deserve to be good jobs,” he told GOOD. 

Organizing in the service industry has languished since the 1980s, but a new cadre of professional organizers is coming of age. These activists were raised middle class, but they are downwardly moble. Many initially assumed that the service industry was just a temporary waystation on the road to a more lucrative career, but with unemployment stubbornly high, and student loan debt pressing in, they have decided to stand and fight for the jobs they have.

[Photo credit: Jezlyn26, Creative Commons.]