The Passing of Ed Schultz Timed Perfectly For The Passing of the Labor Movement
On the night of the disastrous midterm elections in 2010, when Republicans reclaimed the U.S. House of Representatives and, more importantly, statehouses and legislatures in key swing states across the country, the most sage interpretation of the political situation came from MSNBC host Ed Schultz. Schultz, a champion of the labor movement, predicted that foremost among the priorities of the newly elected Republican majorities, would be to crush unions in whatever way possible. I hadn't really thought of it in that specific of terms until Schultz said it, and even then I presumed it would be a general movement to kill the move towards card-check union authorization at the time and other specific priorities of the labor movement. But Schultz's prediction proved even more prophetic than he likely knew when Republican Governors, led by Wisconsin's Scott Walker, orchestrated a well-planned assault on collective bargaining rights within months of taking office in January 2011. Other states followed, with varying degrees of "success", and in the years since, even more states including Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia, have immediately made the jump towards union-busting or right-to-work laws as soon as Republicans claimed full control of state government.
But it wasn't until two weeks ago that the scope of union-busting materialized in a way that will derail the future of collective bargaining nationally and tilt the nature of our two-party system even further down the road of corporate ownership. The United States Supreme Court voted on a 5-4 margin to nationalize Scott Walker's 2011 gambit in Wisconsin, tossing out decades-old precedent ensuring that a public sector union can collect a fee from nonparticipating employees so they're unable to freeload on the efforts of dues-paying members. Most red states have already employed this tactic with the express intent of crushing the union, and it works as participation inevitably declines as the freeloaders increase, resulting in a union unable to effectively function moving forward and ultimately either collapsing or losing its negotiating power. The diminished capacity of the union then affects political campaign donations in two ways, first with shrinking contributions to counter the tsunami of corporate money flooding the system and later with that same lopsided political arrangement leading to an erosion of pay, benefits, and work rules now that the union's opposition has all of the money and all of the political representation.
This should have been a huge headline on June 27th given its implications on campaign financing and worker empowerment for decades to come, but it was overshadowed when hours later, "swing" Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. Kennedy was no less conservative than the four hard-right jurists on the SCOTUS when it came to economic and business issues, but the fact that Trump gets to nominate a replacement who will assuredly be a tick further to Kennedy's right locks in place a horrifically anti-worker and anti-consumer judiciary for generations to come. And I get the feeling that most liberals, Democrats, and union workers are still vastly underestimating the stakes here...
With the Supreme Court so lopsided with conservative jurisprudence, the likelihood is that any would-be left-leaning federal or state government elected in the foreseeable future will face a wall with just about any progressive legislation they put forward. The Court has reinvented itself as something of a "super legislature" in recent years, doing the bidding of the political party they belong to rather than honorably abiding by legal precedent. If it serves the Republican Party interests to throw out legislation passed by liberals at the state, local, or federal level, you can be sure they will do it more often than not. This renders the outcomes of this year's Congressional elections and the next Presidential election generally meaningless from a policy standpoint. The cake is already baked. In fact, there's a very real chance Trump will get to nominate another SCOTUS judge to replace one of the court's aging liberals, making the balance of judicial power even more impenetrably unfavorable.
Eight days after the union-busting ruling and the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, the strongest champion of labor in popular media (Ed Schultz) passed away. It's a disturbing coincidence and an ugly metaphor for the new political reality. Elections have consequences, and the voters' choice on November 8, 2016, now appears to have locked in place a right-wing judiciary poised to rule against labor and consumers for the next generation with hardly any recourse that will have a tangible effect until, at the earliest, most young people today are middle-aged and most middle-aged people today are old. Insofar as it was Obama-voting union members who swung the 2016 election to Donald Trump, then these Obama-Trump voters will go down in history as the architects of their own demise.
But it wasn't until two weeks ago that the scope of union-busting materialized in a way that will derail the future of collective bargaining nationally and tilt the nature of our two-party system even further down the road of corporate ownership. The United States Supreme Court voted on a 5-4 margin to nationalize Scott Walker's 2011 gambit in Wisconsin, tossing out decades-old precedent ensuring that a public sector union can collect a fee from nonparticipating employees so they're unable to freeload on the efforts of dues-paying members. Most red states have already employed this tactic with the express intent of crushing the union, and it works as participation inevitably declines as the freeloaders increase, resulting in a union unable to effectively function moving forward and ultimately either collapsing or losing its negotiating power. The diminished capacity of the union then affects political campaign donations in two ways, first with shrinking contributions to counter the tsunami of corporate money flooding the system and later with that same lopsided political arrangement leading to an erosion of pay, benefits, and work rules now that the union's opposition has all of the money and all of the political representation.
This should have been a huge headline on June 27th given its implications on campaign financing and worker empowerment for decades to come, but it was overshadowed when hours later, "swing" Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement. Kennedy was no less conservative than the four hard-right jurists on the SCOTUS when it came to economic and business issues, but the fact that Trump gets to nominate a replacement who will assuredly be a tick further to Kennedy's right locks in place a horrifically anti-worker and anti-consumer judiciary for generations to come. And I get the feeling that most liberals, Democrats, and union workers are still vastly underestimating the stakes here...
With the Supreme Court so lopsided with conservative jurisprudence, the likelihood is that any would-be left-leaning federal or state government elected in the foreseeable future will face a wall with just about any progressive legislation they put forward. The Court has reinvented itself as something of a "super legislature" in recent years, doing the bidding of the political party they belong to rather than honorably abiding by legal precedent. If it serves the Republican Party interests to throw out legislation passed by liberals at the state, local, or federal level, you can be sure they will do it more often than not. This renders the outcomes of this year's Congressional elections and the next Presidential election generally meaningless from a policy standpoint. The cake is already baked. In fact, there's a very real chance Trump will get to nominate another SCOTUS judge to replace one of the court's aging liberals, making the balance of judicial power even more impenetrably unfavorable.
Eight days after the union-busting ruling and the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, the strongest champion of labor in popular media (Ed Schultz) passed away. It's a disturbing coincidence and an ugly metaphor for the new political reality. Elections have consequences, and the voters' choice on November 8, 2016, now appears to have locked in place a right-wing judiciary poised to rule against labor and consumers for the next generation with hardly any recourse that will have a tangible effect until, at the earliest, most young people today are middle-aged and most middle-aged people today are old. Insofar as it was Obama-voting union members who swung the 2016 election to Donald Trump, then these Obama-Trump voters will go down in history as the architects of their own demise.
posted by Mark at 5:56 PM
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