Are anti-labor election results indicative of a trend that destroys social cohesion and makes it harder for businesses––small and large––to prosper?
On June 13, 2012, Columnist Michael Hiltzik writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Of the social developments of recent decades, certainly one of the most perplexing is the revolt of the working class against workers.
Last week’s election results only scratch the surface of a trend that destroys social cohesion and makes it harder for businesses — small and large — to prosper. Voters in San Jose and San Diego opted to cut public employee pension programs; on the national stage, Wisconsin’s openly anti-labor governor, Scott Walker, handily turned away a recall campaign inspired by his effort to kill collective bargaining rights for public workers.
None of the votes appears to be purely anti-labor. The California polls were expressions of municipal fiscal anxiety, aimed at one of the few lines of a local budget (payroll) that may yet be under voters’ control. Walker apparently prevailed in part because Wisconsinites (unlike Californians) don’t cotton to recalling governors just like that, and also because wealthy industrialists backing Walker outspent unions and Democratic contributors backing his opponent by about 7 to 1.
But the results are a good starting point for a survey of the working- and middle-class landscape in America. It’s important to examine the balance of power between corporations and workers now, and not merely because big money from either side is going to be oozing from candidates’ pores in this electoral season. But labor’s diminishing power has much to do with the weakness of the economic recovery and the bloodlessness of consumer demand. Put simply, when more and more of the bounty of economic growth flows to those who don’t need to spend it, and so little to those who immediately would crank it into the retail economy, demand will continue to stagnate. That means meager job growth.
Worse, as workers battle one another for smaller slices of the same shrinking pie, they see others in the same fix not as neighbors but rivals. Today’s vision of the working-class economy as a zero-sum game underlies public opposition to all sorts of stimulative programs — assistance for strapped homeowners, to cite one example.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20120612,0,1359951.column
