My new sig
27 Feb 2011 09:52![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nwhikerMy new motto, for at least the new few:
United We Bargain
Divided We Beg
I'm really irked by the public employees as Enemy #1 storyline that seems to have taken over the world.
Unions are the starting point. It's very easy to whip up the resentment of the people who are struggling against a faceless UNION, against that nasty Teachers Unions, to pass around the Union "Welfare Queen" stories, focusing on the abuse of a few, and ignoring the overall good work most union organisers and bosses who are working for the collective employees effect.
What the wingers found out in Madison, which I think surprised them, is that when people make the jump from evil, faceless UNION to my kids' school teacher, the nurses and the nurses aide at the hospital my mom was at, the guy at the DMV who was there when my kid got his first license, the person who... whatever. Well then, all of a sudden, it's a lot harder to create the extreme division that is necessary to support what they want to happen.
They're finding that Americans, while they might want to DESTROY the UNION aren't too big on eating their fellow citizens. I think this surprised them.
I think the plan was to destroy the union protections, because that was the faceless part, and once that was accomplished and the standard of living of average workers, union or not, had fallen further, it would be much easier to pit worker against worker, and the race towards the bottom, already well underway, would accelerate, to the bosses' benefit, of course.
It was in another thread that I think I said that they don't care about the status of American workers. They've cut productions costs, by moving to China, to the point where they don't need to sell their items at a high cost, and the ginoumous markets of China and India will provide enough... consuming bodies that the poor in the US not being able to consume at their former level isn't gonna matter one bit.
What bothers me, more and more, is the dichotomy of the society we're creating. We've pretty much decided that if you are a blue collar worker, you don't deserve a part of the American pie, that you're a union parasite anyhow, and should work for peanuts, with no hope for anything better. It's your fault that you're not a doctor or an entrepreneur, right?
What is happening is that... that lower caste of workers who don't "deserve" anything is going to start sliding up the economic scale. It's done for low skilled workers already, we're working on high skilled (union!) workers now, school teachers, the lower ranks of public employees. Eventually, we'll go higher and higher, in both the public and private sector, and only the very top will be safe. A college education won't be a protection (it hasn't been for a while), only a degree in a field that they can't outsource, cheapen, make redundant etc.
The goal? The top 5%, maybe 10% doing real well... and the rest of us.
Divided We Beg
I'm really irked by the public employees as Enemy #1 storyline that seems to have taken over the world.
Unions are the starting point. It's very easy to whip up the resentment of the people who are struggling against a faceless UNION, against that nasty Teachers Unions, to pass around the Union "Welfare Queen" stories, focusing on the abuse of a few, and ignoring the overall good work most union organisers and bosses who are working for the collective employees effect.
What the wingers found out in Madison, which I think surprised them, is that when people make the jump from evil, faceless UNION to my kids' school teacher, the nurses and the nurses aide at the hospital my mom was at, the guy at the DMV who was there when my kid got his first license, the person who... whatever. Well then, all of a sudden, it's a lot harder to create the extreme division that is necessary to support what they want to happen.
They're finding that Americans, while they might want to DESTROY the UNION aren't too big on eating their fellow citizens. I think this surprised them.
I think the plan was to destroy the union protections, because that was the faceless part, and once that was accomplished and the standard of living of average workers, union or not, had fallen further, it would be much easier to pit worker against worker, and the race towards the bottom, already well underway, would accelerate, to the bosses' benefit, of course.
It was in another thread that I think I said that they don't care about the status of American workers. They've cut productions costs, by moving to China, to the point where they don't need to sell their items at a high cost, and the ginoumous markets of China and India will provide enough... consuming bodies that the poor in the US not being able to consume at their former level isn't gonna matter one bit.
What bothers me, more and more, is the dichotomy of the society we're creating. We've pretty much decided that if you are a blue collar worker, you don't deserve a part of the American pie, that you're a union parasite anyhow, and should work for peanuts, with no hope for anything better. It's your fault that you're not a doctor or an entrepreneur, right?
What is happening is that... that lower caste of workers who don't "deserve" anything is going to start sliding up the economic scale. It's done for low skilled workers already, we're working on high skilled (union!) workers now, school teachers, the lower ranks of public employees. Eventually, we'll go higher and higher, in both the public and private sector, and only the very top will be safe. A college education won't be a protection (it hasn't been for a while), only a degree in a field that they can't outsource, cheapen, make redundant etc.
The goal? The top 5%, maybe 10% doing real well... and the rest of us.
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