http://www.indystar.com/article/20081209/OPINION12/812090320/1002/OPINIONMarie Cocco
As Congress and the White House lurch toward possible approval of a loan package for the crippled auto industry, we are undoubtedly in store for more union-bashing. Note well that we did not hear any such tirades when vastly larger sums of taxpayer money -- with fewer strings attached -- were lavished upon the banks and financial industry wizards who created the credit crisis.
Put aside for a moment the misinformation and outright untruths that characterize conservative attacks on the autoworkers' unions. No one should be allowed to cast blame on workers who want nothing more than to maintain a middle-class life.
Unions aren't the problem. They are the solution.
Creating a viable middle class has been the goal of organized labor since labor first became organized. And it is this goal that was abandoned outright by American political and business leaders as they did all they could over the past three decades to encourage a relentless race to the bottom in wages and benefits.
For decades, as wages and benefits for working and middle-class people stagnated or fell, the only way for them to purchase the goods that make the economy hum was through credit. Until we understand that we are in the midst of two crises -- one the short-term credit crisis and one the longer-term crisis in the failure to pay workers what they need to sustain themselves -- we are doomed to repeat this horror.--snip--
"The promise of deregulation was that this would create so much energy and dynamism at the top that it would all trickle down," Gerstle says. "Not only would people on Wall Street make all kinds of money, but people on Main Street would find that there would be more dynamism in their lives, more opportunity, more wages."
Well, people on Wall Street did make all kinds of money. People on Main Street got depressed wages, the demise of guaranteed pensions and 401(k)s that crashed with the stock market.
We are engulfed by an economic morass that holds the prospect of being the deepest and broadest downturn of the post-World War II era. It is no coincidence that the percentage of private-sector workers in unions -- about 7 percent -- is roughly the same as what it was before the Great Depression. Historically, Gerstle says, social movements have needed direct and often unsettling action to capture the public's imagination and take hold.
This is why we can only hope that events such as the unfolding peaceful occupation of a Chicago window factory by its newly laid-off workers is the start of something much, much bigger.Marie Cocco writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.
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