National view: Right-to-work is a needed recalibration
December 15, 2012 at 6:00 pm in Duluth News Tribune
For all the fury and fistfights outside the Lansing Capitol, what happened in Michigan last week was a simple accommodation to reality. The most famously unionized state, birthplace of the United Auto Workers, royalty of the American working class, became right-to-work.
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All the conclusions that Krauthammer leads people to believe seem to make sense if you conveniently ignore all the important elements of the economy that he fails to mention. This new “equilibrium” is nothing more than a way to sell America the idea that working for less is a good thing, while people at the top take a greater share of the wealth being produced. If we are supposed to buy this argument, our grandchildren will work for 3rd world wages and be expected to do so without any resistance. This is exactly what the so-called free market profiteers want. “Obedient workers,” as George Carlin put it.
Yet all of this fails to acknowledge that the only reason most workers have had a decent standard of living, the 40 hour workweek, the minimum wage, safe working conditions, and every else we’ve simply come to expect is because the workers had to fight for every one of these things. These were NEVER simply handed to workers by a benevolent upper-class, and they never will be.
Yet Krauthammer and others would have you forget that. This “new equilibrium” is their vision for the world, it is not an inevitability. They are only in our newspapers and on our TVs to train the right-wing, and by extension the general public, to justify the unpopular actions of the ultra-rich. “No, you can’t have good wages because of this…” “No, we can’t have a clean environment because of that…” If you talk with people on the right, you’ll see this time and time again. And it’s a direct result of this type of propaganda that only tells part of the story. Little by little, our livelihoods are being stripped from us… So while now we’re talking about unions and wages in 2012, we’ve already forgot all the things that were stripped from us yesteryear: All the things we had in the 70s that were taken away in the 80s, all the things in the 80s that were taken away in the 90s, and so forth.
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“Little by little, our livelihoods are being stripped from us…” I suppose the definition of livelihood is a matter of personal interpretation but I wonder if you intend to include the ever increasing attempts to strip away the rights of gun owners in your list of things that will soon be taken away? Friday’s tragedy certainly will re-ignite more attempts to strip away more of our livelihoods.
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