Workers Toppled a Dictator in Egypt, But Might be Silenced
in Wisconsin

by Harold Meyerson

The Washington Post
February 16, 2011

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/15/AR2011021504339.html

reposted on
The American Prospect - web only
February 17, 2011

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=workers_rights_here_and_abroad

In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In
the United States, by contrast, February is shaping up as
the cruelest month workers have known in decades.

The coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens
of thousands of Egyptian workers went on strike beginning
last Tuesday. By Friday, when Egypt's military leaders
apparently decided that unrest had reached the point where
Mubarak had to go, the Egyptians who operate the Suez Canal
and their fellow workers in steel, textile and bottling
factories; in hospitals, museums and schools; and those who
drive buses and trains had left their jobs to protest their
conditions of employment and governance. As Jim Hoagland
noted in The Post, Egypt was barreling down the path that
Poland, East Germany and the Philippines had taken, the path
where workers join student protesters in the streets and
jointly sweep away an authoritarian regime.

But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo,
one state government in particular was moving to topple
workers' organizations here in the United States. Last
Friday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin's new Republican governor,
proposed taking away most collective bargaining rights of
public employees. Under his legislation, which has moved so
swiftly through the newly Republican state legislature that
it might come to a vote Thursday, the unions representing
teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public
hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose
the right to bargain over health coverage, pensions and
other benefits. (To make his proposal more politically
palatable, the governor exempted from his hit list the
unions representing firefighters and police.) The only thing
all other public-sector workers could bargain over would be
their base wages, and given the fiscal restraints plaguing
the states, that's hardly anything to bargain over at all.
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You might think that Walker came to this extreme measure
after negotiations with public-sector unions had reached an
impasse. In fact, he hasn't held such discussions. "I don't
have anything to negotiate," Walker told the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel last week. To underscore just how accompli
he considered his fait, he vowed to call in the National
Guard if protesting workers walked off the job or disrupted
state services.

It's a throwback to 19th-century America, when strikes were
suppressed by force of arms. Or, come to think of it, to
Mubarak's Egypt or communist Poland and East Germany.

Now, it's not as if our states don't have fiscal crises to
address, and Walker insists that it's Wisconsin's empty till
that has driven him to curtail workers' rights. But there
are other options. Democratic governors such as California's
Jerry Brown and New York's Andrew Cuomo have proposed
scaling back public services, pay and benefits without going
after workers' fundamental rights to bargain. The right to
bargain is clearly a separate question. Newly elected
Republican governors, however, may reach the same conclusion
Walker did and use the recession-induced fiscal crisis to
achieve a partisan political objective: removing unions, the
most potent force in the Democrats' electoral operation,
from the landscape. "If we just stop and cure the pension
problem, we have not gone far enough," Steve Malanga of the
Manhattan Institute's City Journal said at the Conservative
Political Action Conference last weekend.

The real goal of the American right is to reduce public
employee unions to the level of private-sector unions, which
now represent fewer than 7 percent of American workers.
Walker's proposal not only confines public-sector unions to
annual bargaining over wage increases but restricts the
increases for state employees to raises in the consumer
price index and compels every such union to hold an annual
membership vote to determine whether the union can continue
to represent workers. It clearly intends to smash these
unions altogether.

Which would yield what? Our unions have already been
decimated in the private sector; the results are plain.
Corporate profits are soaring, while domestic investment,
wages and benefits (particularly at nonunion companies) are
flat-lining at best. With nobody to bargain for workers,
America increasingly is an economically stagnant,
plutocratic utopia. Is everybody happy?

American conservatives often profess admiration for foreign
workers' bravery in protesting and undermining authoritarian
regimes. Letting workers exercise their rights at home,
however, threatens to undermine some of our own regimes (the
Republican ones particularly), and shouldn't be permitted.
Now that Wisconsin's governor has given the Guard its
marching orders, we can discern a new pattern of global
repressive solidarity emerging - from the chastened pharaoh
of the Middle East to the cheesehead pharaoh of the Middle
West.

[Harold Meyerson is a weekly columnist for The Post, writing
mainly about politics. His column appears on Wednesdays.

Meyerson is executive editor of the American Prospect as
well as a member of the editorial board of Dissent. From
1989 to 2001, he was executive editor of the L.A. Weekly.
From 1991 to 1995, Meyerson hosted the weekly show "Real
Politics" on the public radio station KCRW in Sanata Monica,
Calif. He is a frequent guest on television and radio talk
shows and has been a regular columnist for The Post since
2003. He is the author of "Who Put The Rainbow in The Wizard
of Oz?" (1995), a biography of Broadway lyricist Yip
Harburg.]

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