02/19/2011:
THE ANGER IN WISCONSIN: A PERSONAL VIEW.
I. I grew up lower-middle-class in Missouri and Illinois. My family, although it had plenty of pride, had no money and no influence. I managed to push my way through college in increments with my own funds, graduating—finally—with honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the age of 39.
Meanwhile, of course, I was working. I got my first job washing dishes in a bar in New Jersey when I was 16 and have been pretty much keeping my nose to the grindstone ever since.
And as far as my multifaceted and lengthy working career goes, I long since reached the conclusion that private employers (of which I’ve had many) treated me far, far worse than public employers (of which I’ve also had many, including federal, state and local governments). Private employers, with one notable exception—National Health Laboratories Inc. in Washington state—treated me poorly, always demanding more and more from an already hardworking young man, finally “downsizing” me (if I didn’t get smart and bail out first). It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the top management was raking in nearly all of the money, and when the gravy train ran out they’d take what was left and run off into the sunset with their golden parachutes and luxury cars (or ship their operation to unprotected laborers outside our borders). Wanna know why almost everything you see these days is “Made in China” or “Hecho en Mexico”? Take a guess.
Yes, the “conservative” (in this case read: stupid) counterargument runs, corporations have their first duty to the SHAREHOLDERS! And as long as the SHAREHOLDERS! are making a healthy profit, or even a bloated profit, everything is hunky-dory and it’s another great day for American capitalism.
But the reason this argument is stupid is that it overlooks two very important facts:
1) An American corporation’s duty to this country and its citizens; and
2) The right of hardworking men and women to make a decent wage with decent benefits (if you have a problem with this, let’s just take it right back to Charles Dickens, or Hoxha’s Albania).
At some point in the 1980s, American business started to get the idea that it owed nothing to this country or the people who live here, except insofar as there existed opportunities for exploitation. This led to today’s situation in which nobody really knows who is behind many of our largest corporations; the entire leadership apparatus is veiled behind an inpenetrable web of offshore holding interests, phony subsidiaries, and banks in the Cayman Islands. What is even American about these behemoths, when they often contribute less to our tax coffers than you or I and employ as few Americans as possible? You tell me.
But at least the SHAREHOLDERS! are happy.
II. Because of the vagaries of the economy and changes in technology, I have had long careers as a typesetter, an information-systems professional, and a commercial driver. At the top of my financial game, I made almost $60,000 a year as an electronic magazine editor (the investor who funded this enterprise suddenly grew bored the week before Christmas and laid off all of his employees except for his personal secretary—typical private-sector stuff). Right now, as a school bus and truck driver, I make about a third of that—in otherwords, about what I made when I worked for National Health Laboratories Inc. back in the late Seventies.
There is much more to the unrest in Wisconsin than the whining of perpetually-aggrieved teachers’ unions, a whining that seems to go on without letup no matter who’s in charge and that becomes hard to abide when you realize that many of these teachers are making as much, or more, than I did as a private-sector magazine editor (and with much better benefits).
If you discount the teachers, there are roughly 150,000 state, county and municipal employees in Wisconsin, the majority of whom are represented by unions. Governor Walker made sure early on, even before he was elected, that he alienated every public-sector union member in the state by referring to us as “fat cats.” He seems to believe that all civil servants, from 25-year veterans like my wife who have worked their way steadily up the ladder right down to lowly school bus drivers like myself, should subsist on poverty-level wages or be let go, whichever comes first. Never mind that all civil servants have spent the past eight years reeling under Gov. Jim “Asshat” Doyle’s abuse and neglect, and that real wages for public-sector employees have been declining since 2000. I myself received not a cent in salary increases from 2000 until 2005 (in 2006, the year I left state service, I received a raise that came out to about $5 per paycheck).
Sure, there are cuts that could be made in state government without further affecting the state’s ability to conduct business—already severely curtailed through layoffs and early retirements during the Doyle administration. Any of my faithful readers know how I feel about Wisconsin’s enormous affirmative-action bureaucracy. And it’s hard to know why we need an equally huge HR apparatus right now when next to no one has been hired in, well, years. Or why we need a bloated Department of Administration when so many other states function just fine without one. Or why the University of Wisconsin is a sacred cow that is always exempted from the cuts and layoffs.
But Gov. Walker’s critical thinking doesn’t extend that far—not surprinsing, since he flunked out of college. His approach to shrinking government is to eliminate all rights for state, county, and municipal employees—so that all of us serve at his pleasure, and if (for example) he walks into my workplace one day and announces that he has decided that our school district would be better served by a private bus company, all of us fat-cat school bus drivers ($20,000 a year!) will be on the streets immediately, with no recourse. Never mind that Walker knows nothing about the transportation industry; when you grant absolute power to a governor, little things like that don’t matter anymore.
Walker has said many times that he has no interest in sitting down with public-sector employees, even though many are willing to grant concessions. (My own union voluntarily froze salaries across the board for the next two years, nearly a year before Walker was elected.)
In essence, Scott Walker wants to bring all the worst excesses of the private sector into Wisconsin’s public sector. The private sector started to prove in the Eighties that it had divorced itself from any sense of responsibility to this country or the people who live here (bear in mind that those workers in Mexico and Singapore who are doing the jobs Americans once did have no rights and make starvation wages). And let’s not forget for a minute that the private sector’s freewheeling, the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me ethos sank the country into an economic collapse from which it may never fully recover.
Walker’s proposal to Wisconsinites is simple: Give me the power, and I’ll visit the same kind of ruin on the public sector as the private sector has inflicted upon this nation.
As one woman’s sign read at the Capitol square in Madison yesterday: THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU POKE A BADGER IN THE EYE. Scott Walker has apparently vastly overestimated the stupidity of Wisconsin’s people.
Not surprising, since he is one of the stupidest. And proud of it.
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