Tweet
The very public fight in Wisconsin over labor unions’ collective bargaining rights seems to have resulted in a strong surge in union pride among labor households, and made liberal Democrats’ support of labor significantly stronger.
A new Pew poll compared the change in opinions about labor unions over the past few weeks as the Wisconsin fight over collective bargaining rights has been taking place. Among all Americans, there has been a modest increase in unions’ net favorable rates, and, looking at the internals, a huge 18-point surge among labor households and liberal Democrats who now hold a “very favorable” opinion of unions.
This public showdown with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has succeeded in rallying labor households and progressives around the country behind unions.
It will be interesting to see if this quickly growing support for unions among liberal Democrats translates into these two stalwart segments of the Democratic party working more closely together, not just on electoral politics, but on pro-labor policy.
25 Comments
Surely you jest. O & D.C. D power structure gonna work closely with wingnuts in WI to try to subvert union power. Unions & libs should spend any excess energy (not that they don’t have enuf on their plates right now) divorcing themselves from Ds & forming a Workers Party.
I worked for the State of Illinois for many years but not as a union member (many state employees are not required to join the union as some righties insist). However, with the way Wisconsin Gov. Walker is bulldozing his way over public sector employees and trying to gin up warfare between public and private sector employees, I decided to join Illinois AFSCME for retirees. The cost? A whopping $2/month.
((((Trublulu5)))
Sometimes backlash works in the correct direction.
Maybe some people are coming out of the “fog” they have lived in and are beginning to realize that without the right to collective bargaining, whether in the public or private sector, they are completely at the mercy of their employers in regards to wages, benefits, and working conditions.
No offense, but waiting to see if the so-called “Democratic” party will support unionized workers in WI and elsewhere seems like a fools errand to me. Didn’t you hear that Barack Obama is touring FL schools tomorrow with JEB… in order that Obama can laud JEB on his crappy public school “agenda” in FL when JEB was FL Gov??
Obama and the Vichyrats tipped their hats a long time ago, but more resoundingly in 2009 & 2010, that they are but one arm of the Happy Corporatist Monied Elite Party. They’re “just not into us,” Mr. Walker.
Time for another party to be formed. I’ll go along with eCAHN: how ’bout a Workers Party?
Some people think that the Bill of Rights applies to corps vs. employees, but it doesn’t. It applies only to USG vs citizens. Not that even that means much anymore.
Workers have almost NO rights vis-a-vis employers. They may be terminated at any time without cause and paid whatever the much more powerful employer feels like when he gets out of bed in the morning.
And even collective bargaining ‘contracts’ are not regarded as legally enforceable anymore.
Relax, onitgoes! The National Democratic Party is one thing. State Democratic Parties are another. And it’s at the local and state levels that our new progressives will come from. Gotta start somewhere, right?
Everyone knows O’s a damn joke. But the WI 14 aren’t a joke. Neither are the folks in IN.
The way I see it, we’re headed in the right direction.
Casual observers confuse numbers with power & dollars. So they think that voters matter bc there are so many of them. Ditto workers.
But evidence shows that real power is in the hands of a few, monied interests, without org of the many.
Unions, for all their myriad faults, are the only way I’ve noticed that workers get anything at all.
Unless the unemployment rate is below 4%, which empirically seems to be the point at which workers are so scarce that corps must bid them away from each other by paying more.
And thus insure true electoral minority status for any such party for at least ten years – in these times?
And a damn sight sooner than we expected, huh. It’s cause for some hope and certainly cause to celebrate the 14 and the Madison protesters. They are showing the rest of us just *how* it’s done!
Fair enough.
However, voting for corp Ds would seem to be a worse alternative. We’ve been doing that for decades, and the situation has only gotten worse, much worse. What was that definition of insanity again…
Reasonable peeps may disagree on this one.
Surprisingly, many working class people are jealous of the benefits and stability of their union member peers and want to reduce public sector pay and benefits. Why aren’t the non-union workers aspiring to IMPROVE their own situation by joining or forming unions? Why aren’t they jealous of the obscene wealth of CEO’s like the Koch brothers or Jamie Dimon and his ilk? Why don’t they attach those huge Wall Street bonuses instead of wanting their union member peers to join them in the race to the bottom? Why aren’t the Democrats making that obvious argument? At one time in America, we aspired upward. We now want everyone to be poor. Has the Republican machine been THAT successful? or is our workforce simply becoming too dumb to make that case? or both. The unconscionable CEO pay common today would not previously have been possible in the face of union pressure and publicity. ALL of the state house problems, education problems, homeless problems, prison problems, etc. are the result of poverty in America. The great disparity in income and wealth today is the CAUSE not a symptom of our decline to 3rd world status.
Exactly. I feel this is the beginning of a real opportunity to take back the Democratic Party.
The righties have worked hard for decades to demonize the left. And the workers don’t have the $$$ or the power to organize.
Union bashing has been around for decades and most of us have been completely unaware of what a union really is. I was anti-union for years? I heard that they just take money out of your pocket and live the highlife off those dues and waste the rest senselessly! Of course that was 20th century thinking!
As opposed to having practically zero representation in Congress? Hell, “minority status” would be an improvement at this point.
Got to butt in now.
Repug congress members doing robo call town hall meetings. Discussing govt shut down over budget temporarily.
It is an HOUR long call.
Your concerns are well-taken, especially for Southern Ds. The approach I think should be taken is an inside-outside approach, much like that of the Tea Party. Have a large voter base that vets and recommends major party candidates or runs their own candidates based on local circumstances. The magic number for Congress is 160,000 or so votes, whatever coalition you can put it together with. But the candidate should know that for endorsement, they must hold firm on certain issues — like collective bargaining, child labor laws, wage and hour laws, and international negotiation of higher labor standards. BTW, the ILO is conducting an international campaign against forced labor, in plain English slavery. In 2011. That gives you an idea of where the race to the bottom can end up.
Sign me up. New member of the working party.Where ever it goes i will sleep better knowing i tried.
I suppose the thoughtful response would be it depends on how corrupt you think the D party is & whether there is any of the old Ds to rebuild on.
New DINO gov in NYS is Andrew Cuomo, son of former gov Mario Cuomo, who was already a ‘moderate’ by standards of those days, decades ago. AC sounds just like Crazie-R-Christie gov next door in NJ, demonizing workers, demanding sacrifices by little people, etc.
So in my observation, there’s not enough noncorp slave substance to ‘retake’ in the D party.
As I wrote earlier today, the monied interests have vetted all the D & R candidates long before real people know who they are. And the inside/outside approach that you describe for TPers is really an inside/deeply inside approach, since TPers are the real tools of the far far right, paid for lock stock & barrel by Kochs et al. We’ve got nothing like that on our side.
On edit: I wouldn’t be surprised if O weren’t recruited when he was made head of Harvard Law Review.
I had a job that I HAD to keep or my kids would not eat. And I wanted to go to meetings when unionizing was being discussed by nurses. Hospital employees took photos of the cars, the license plates, etc. which depressed turn-out.
Then management caved to the nurses and they said OK techs, we got what we wanted, sorry about your luck…
Another “leader” who doesn’t believe in collective bargaining:
Qaddafi
Wow, a group trying to move public opinion–and succeeding–rather than simply throwing their hands up and complaining about how they can’t get anything done because the current environment doesn’t support it. What a concept!
“VichyRats” ha ha ha. that is a PERFECT description of the clinton-obummer-geithner dlc sell out scum.
rmm