Author: Neil Hanson

Is it union-busting or responsible fiscal management?

It’s been really interesting to me to watch as the Wisconsin labor issues have been unfolding this week. It’s become a battle between wage-earners and those with all the power and money, and who knows how it will lay when its all unfolded.

My formative years growing up were spent in a blue-collar neighborhood. My buddies when I was growing up had dads who were carpenters and truck-drivers. Most were part of a union – at least the lucky ones were. While in my house and around the dinner table, unions were something spoken of in negative tones, it was a very different picture I got from the kids I hung out with.

It wasn’t that my dad was harshly anti-union, it’s just that his perspective was that the unions had too much power, and could influence the running of a company to a degree he didn’t like. I think that as the years went by, he became more anti-union.

Intellectually, all the arguments I was armed with were anti-union. The focus was on the corruption and greed. That’s the side of organized labor that I saw. This came to a head in my mid-20’s, when I had a job as a truck driver in a union shop. It was a good job, but after a short initial period, it would require that I join the union. Once I joined the union, then union dues would start coming from my paycheck, and I felt like I might fall off the dark side of an issue.

Then, one morning, I was headed to a job with one of the senior drivers. While he wasn’t the shop steward, he was clearly a senior member of the crew. I could tell that it was his intent this morning to make sure I understood that I’d need to go down and join the union, and he was looking to find out where I stood on things.

Bill Shelley was his name, (spelled like the poet, I recall him telling me), and I can remember the conversation like it was yesterday. Bill was a big burly fella. On our drive, I spoke honestly to him about my problem with unions as a whole, and my discomfort with the fact that I now would need to join one. Bill’s response floored me. While I expected a harsh confrontation from this big burly guy, what I got was a sensitive and understanding response.

He understood clearly how I could feel this way. He understood that the press painted organized labor in a negative light, so it would be pretty hard for anyone to feel positive without first-hand experience. There was no option for me to continue to work there without joining the union, but there was great understanding on Bill’s part regarding how I might feel like I did.

Bill talked a lot that morning about how organized labor in general had benefited his family, and most of the folks that he lived and worked around. He had some truly inspiring first-hand stories that he shared with me. It was one of those moments when my world-view was shifting dramatically – I was being forced to see things from a different perspective than I’d seen them before.

Bill helped me see that the only reason decent blue-collar neighborhoods existed was because organized labor kept wages high enough to allow a middle class to exist. Take that away, destroy the blue-collar working class in this country who makes enough to live a decent life, and how long can the country last without beginning to look like the feudal economies our forefathers ran from when they built this country?

“Class” is a concept Bill was comfortable talking about. He had no problem with the idea that “class” was alive and well in the country. In fact, it was a person’s ability to identify strongly with a “class” that was a critical component to a healthy society in his opinion. He was proud to be part of a “working class”, and was willing to fight to make sure that his working class didn’t get pushed into the sewers by those with all the power and money.

Corruption? Sure there was corruption in organized labor. There’s corruption in any large organization. It’s part and parcel to the human condition. There’s nothing unique to the concept of organized labor that makes it any more or less corrupt than AIG, Enron, or Congress to use examples from today. Does the media attack the concept of government or the concept of “corporate america” as bad ideas just because corruption exists within their walls?

Fast-forward.

Everything Bill talked about has come to pass. The press has continued for decades to paint organized labor in a negative light. Those with the power and money have continued to bust unions and weaken organized labor for 30 years. The watershed event was when Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controller’s union, signaling a brand new era when it’s OK to bust labor, because the press will support you.

As Bill predicted, wages in America have plummeted as organized labor has diminished. In the late 70’s, I was an independent businessman who hired casual labor. Generally, I paid about $10/hr for casual labor. Sometimes I could get by for $8/hr. Today, I’m an independent businessman who hires casual labor. I still pay about $10/hr for casual labor. With inflation, that’s probably about equal to paying $3/hr or so back when Bill Shelley and I were having our conversations.

Sure I like that my labor cost is low. But keeping that labor cost low in this country has resulted in the loss of a viable and strong working middle class. The folks I hired back in the 70’s had families, and they supported those families with their hard work. The folks I hire today couldn’t possible support a family on wages. Moms and dads work multiple jobs just to try and pay the rent. Discretionary money for “nice things” is a myth they’ve heard about.

While all this has been happening, the wealthy classes in America have Congress bought and paid for. Firmly in their pocket, they’ve assured that we’ve lowered their taxes, regardless of the fact that doing so has driven the nation to the brink of bankruptcy. Unlike the average American family, Congress seems to believe that you can cut your revenue without reducing expense, and there will be no consequence to pay.

The result? We’re broke. We didn’t just dig this hole this year or last year – we’ve been digging it for 30 years. The hole we dug happened because we took money from our budget, and gave it to the taxpayers. Sure everyone benefited from those lower taxes, but those who benefited the most were those with the most money. I’m a taxpayer – I like paying lower taxes. But the cost of those lower taxes has been this deep financial hole we’ve dug for ourselves.

I’ve know folks who’ve learned how to manage money from Congress. They go out and spend lots of money on things they want, and just charge it to the credit card. I watch it happen, knowing full well where it leads. It takes a while, but eventually the chickens come home to roost, and they wake up in bankruptcy. They rarely understand how they really got there – they always want to blame some recent event – look for something that caused this to happen to them. They hardly ever take real accountability and make the lifestyle changes required to dig out of the hole – a hole that will probably take them a lifetime to dig back out of.

That’s where we are right now. We’ve spent 30 years digging this hole by spending more money than we take in. As a behavioral scientist would predict, we’re not taking accountability for our actions – accepting that all those tax cuts we bought year after year on the credit card is what’s put us in a place where we can barely service our debt. Instead, we’re looking for someone to blame for our problems.

And in Wisconsin, the governor has found someone he wants to blame. Working folks. He figures that the media has done such a great job of denigrating organized labor that there just won’t be many folks who’ll sympathize with them, and that in the end, this is his chance to bust the unions. Apparently he’s said as much on a phone call.

There aren’t many bastions of organized labor left in our nation. There’s no doubt that busting this union will save the state some money, and there’s no doubt that this is a great time to attack organized labor if that’s what you want to do. But, I suspect that there’s been no real and genuine attempt to take the money first from all the places that need it less than working men and women.

Trying to balance budgets on the backs of working men and women might reap some short-term gains for folks with power and money, but in the long run, it’s bad policy for the nation. Keep taking away from that big middle of America, and who’s left to buy all the crap we want to import from China and sell from the shelves of Walmart?

Bill Shelley was right-on. I feel fortunate to have gotten some insight from him 35 years ago. I only wish his wisdom could be heard over the din of the media elite.

I want to point out that there’s no mention of Democrat or Republican in this post. This isn’t an issue of Democrats or Republicans, Left or Right, Conservative or Liberal. This is an issue of supporting working men and women in our country, and looking for ways to strengthen our economy. Our economy gets strong again when we revitalize that vast working middle class in the country. Slashing wages and the ability of those workers to organize does the opposite – it continues down the path of destruction of our vital working class.

After spending a couple weeks in SE Asia, I’m working hard on putting together an adjusted view of the concept of corruption, and how it effects the way we’re able to live our lives.

The first observation is that nearly all the “westerners” we met had a firm and preconceived notion of what corruption was, and how awful it is in SE Asia. For the most part, they came here prepared to be appalled at the level of corruption in the governments here, and the level of poverty of the people, and they were generally able to find ways to be appalled by exactly what they wanted to be appalled by. In most cases, I think their expectations were exceeded.

Because corruption is certainly evident and destructive over here. They don’t try too hard to hide it.

My second observation was that folks who lived here had the same view of government that most people all over the world have of their own government. That is, they think the government is corrupt, and that folks with money and power find ways to bilk the common folk from whatever they have in order to continue to line the pocketbooks of those who already have money and power. They think that the government is usually nothing more than a tool for those with the money and power.

Hard to disagree with that point of view.

I want to use the term “lifestyle”, but I want to define my use of it first. Most westerners see this word and think it means what kind of car a person drives, how big their house is, how expensive the restaurants are that a person eats at, how elaborate a person’s vacations are, etc. Because for most westerners, that’s how lifestyles are delineated.

But for most of the folks over here, the delineation is far wider than this. There is a wide gap between the masses of folks who work 7 days a week for $5/day if they’re lucky, and the very few who have all the power and wealth.

That said, I think the corruption over here is more offensive to us for two reasons:

1. It seems so much more “wrong” to us that so many live lives of such poverty, while so few skim the bribes at their expense.
2. The corruption is so evident – they don’t know how to hide it well.

I need to noodle on this for a while, and want to write about it. For now, I only want to say that the nature of this whole corruption thing feels a little different than I expected it to feel. It’s nasty and evil without a doubt. Beyond that, though, I’m not sure it stacking itself up in the nice neat little package I’ve been taught to observe.

Back to that Tall Ships post again – this doesn’t fit a pattern I have yet, and I need to noodle through it a bit to see if I can fathom the shapes I think I see out there…

This is so darned simple. It amazes me that the media and politicians can continually make it sound so complex. We’ve dug ourselves into this debt hole over the past 30 years as a result of irresponsibility, demonstrated in 2 ways:

1. First, politicians lower taxes without cutting spending. This is really simple math, and no amount of voodoo economics will make this a different equation than it is.
2. Second, we as voters must bear responsibility for electing the politicians who continually tell us the happy stories about how we can just keep charging things on the credit card without taking accountability for what we’re spending.

It’s no more complex than that. While I might blame the neoliberals for starting us down this path, at some point, we as voters must take accountability for our decision in election after election to vote for the guy who says “cut taxes”, rather than the guy who says “be accountable”. Since politicians learned back in the 80’s that we wouldn’t pay attention to the debt as it ballooned out of control, they just kept playing the game.

The most vicious, underhanded, and filthy of the tricks they played with our money was the theft of money from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, in order to make the deficit appear smaller than it really was.

When the taxpayers agree to give money to the government for a specific purpose, one responsibility lawmakers have is to make sure the money goes to the purpose the taxpayers agreed. The taxpayer is entrusting money to the lawmakers, with the understanding that the lawmakers won’t skim the money to some end they decide they’d rather fund.

That’s really simple, isn’t it? Somebody argue with me if I’m wrong about this. In this scenario, wouldn’t you consider it theft or embezzlement or at the very least fraud if a lawmaker took money you gave him for one purpose, and just decided to use it for something else?

Back in the 80’s when this started to get out of control, I remember complaining about it to my friends, most of whom claimed to be politically conservative. How, I asked, can a conservative approve of this sort of theft, not to mention that even with the theft, we’re not balancing the budget? “It’s not theft”, they’d reply, “because it’s really just borrowing. The government is simply borrowing money from Social Security in order to temporarily fund other programs and tax cuts – when Social Security needs the money back, the government will give it to them.”

Right. And pigs fly.

So here we are, approaching the place where Social Security will need that money back that Congress has been “borrowing” for the past 30 years. In fact, we recently put ourselves on the express train to that spot, by reducing the amount that we, as taxpayers, pay into Social Security with each paycheck.

Now the moment of truth is fast arriving. If I was right, and this was theft and fraud, then the response of our elected officials will be to tell us that Social Security is rapidly running out of money, and we’re going to need to reduce benefits. If I was wrong, and this is just borrowing, then the response of our elected officials will be to explain to us now how they intend to raise the money to pay back the trillions they’ve “borrowed” from Social Security over the last 30 years.

It’s really that simple. And the answer is……

Listen to President Obama last night in his State of the Union address. No talk of paying that debt back – just talk of how we reduce benefits.

Listen to the news yourself, and see what you hear other elected officials saying. Is anyone talking about the money we need to raise to pay back the loan we owe to Social Security and Medicare? That debt, by the way, is $4.6 Trillion dollars. How on earth will we raise an additional $4.6 trillion, when we can’t even come close to balancing our current budget?

The answer is clear. Our lawmakers have no intention of paying the debts that they’ve incurred. Instead, they’ll simply run away from their responsibility. That makes what’s been happening for the past 30 years theft and embezzlement – plain and simple. I wish I’d been wrong on this one, but current politics is proving me all too right…

The older I get, the more tired I become with these losers we keep sending to Washington – the ones who’re too cowardly to own up to their responsibility to balance the budget they’re put in charge of. They can’t stand up to the taxpayer and tell the taxpayer what he really owes, so like the cowards they are, they keep telling the taxpayer they’ll reduce taxes, knowing all the while that this is irresponsible and cowardly.

They’ll keep taking the money from our elderly, to fund their pet pork projects. When will we get tired enough of this to get rid of these losers?