Even as the dust begins to settle on the all-out battle between unions and electorate in Wisconsin, the consequences of the unions’ defeat there can be seen in the most unlikely place yet: Massachusetts.
Yesterday, the state House voted decisively to end government worker collective bargaining privileges over health care, by a margin of 111 to 42. The measure was crafted and pushed through by House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo:
“By spending less on the health care costs of municipal employees, our cities and towns will be able to retain jobs and allot more funding to necessary services like education and public safety,’’ he said in a statement.
This is a big problem for labor unions – and the President. Their entire strategy in opposing challenges to their privileges has been to allege that it is some right-wing plot, probably dreamed up by the Koch brothers, aimed at stripping poor workers of their rights.
The Massachusetts action refutes that narrative comprehensively. The action state governments are taking all over the nation is one driven by budgetary necessity. Government workers have been living high on the hog on the back of taxpayer money. That is simply unsustainable, which is why Democrats in Massachusetts and Republicans in Wisconsin are doing the same thing – revoking those privileges to save money.
Meanwhile, the reaction of the state AFL-CIO underscores another truth about the way labor unions operate:
The unions view Democrats they elect as their servants, not the public’s. Government sector unions take money from their represented employees’ paychecks, use the money to elect their own politicians, bargain with those politicians to increase the number and compensation of public employees and take more money from their paychecks. This is a truly vicious cycle for our democracy.
So three cheers for Robert DeLeo and his colleagues! They have acted responsibly, broken the vicious cycle and refuted the unions’ poisonous narrative all in one courageous vote. They deserve our thanks.
For more on how necessity is prompting Democrats to take on the unions, see my colleage Ivan Osorio at Openmarket.
