*I wrote this in 2007 (I think), and am a long-time supporter of organized labor, having belonged for many years to the actors’ unions as well as the Dramatists’ Guild. Collective bargaining is collective power, and collective power creates change, opportunity, stability, and growth. Scranton Joe agrees, More Americans now feel positively about Unions than in any period for forty-plus years, basically since the %#&*$#@ Reagan Administration.
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” – Warren Buffett
Here are the ‘overpaid’ professions that the Republican Party would like to Union bust by crushing collective bargaining as well as the right to strike:
Nurses
Cops
Firefighters
Teachers
Sanitation workers
Social Service Workers
Government secretaries, assistants and clerks
Bus drivers
I am sure I’m missing some but as I make this list here is one thing I know for a fact to be true: I don’t want to perform any of the above necessary jobs and furthermore, not one of the above is what I would call, unlike far too many CEOs, overpaid. No question, when I read that a superintendant of schools on Long Island is making six figures (Syosset pays its super something like $336k) I feel a little bit queasy but then, Syosset school taxes are paid for via property tax, and if my own are anything to go by, they’re not bad all things considered. And anyway, if the good folks of Syosset aren’t having a cow about it, who’m I to complain? Nobody likes paying taxes, period but the Republican Party’s full-throttle drive to keep raising taxes off the table – and even almost worse, the Democrats going along with it – while our state and federal budgets are broke or near broke, is ridiculous, stupid and even dangerous as we continue to borrow money against our children’s future from the Chinese among others. We can, somehow, afford to continue two wars as well as building a wall on the border we share with Mexico (one that I personally find so deeply offensive to everything I love about the American Story, I feel queasier thinking about it than I do when reading about the salary mentioned above), we can also somehow continue to give our elected representatives regularly scheduled raises, fabulous pensions and the best healthcare in existence (okay maybe Bill & Melinda Gates have slightly better healthcare…) and we can, despite the above, feel no demonstrable pain about cutting education, health coverage for the poor along with transportation and infrastructure projects that our nation is begging for if we are to continue to have any vision around global competitiveness……..
Let me be clear: Big Business doesn’t care – big business has already moved overseas to places where unions don’t exist, places like China and India and Indonesia; places where the idea of workers rights is as foreign a concept as pensions, healthcare and that quaint concept, middle class standards of living………And shall we note that the overwhelming (something like 60%) number of workers these unions currently under fire represent are women….and lest we forget unions made the following possible in the US of A: the 5 day work week, the 8 hour day and child labor laws among other good and needful things. And unions, with their commitment to worker’s rights, put regulations on the books that made the workplaces of America safe, creating conditions that made the middle class possible. And by the way, the vanishing middle class is not those who make over $150-250k or more per year but rather those who somehow miraculously manage to raise their families on salaries that hover around 30-70k per year… and unless you’ve done that (N.B.: 100 members of our current congress are millionaires), shut the hell up about the ‘entitled’ union members who need to be taught a lesson. Deep breath and thank you Warren Buffett for your good sense and the Coffee Party Movement for the Buffett quote…….