First as tragedy, then as farce

As collective bargaining has been rolled back, efforts to suppress voting have returned, inequality has grown, and unregulated big money again dominates politics.

  I don't read any long articles on line, so I didn't see this until the August 10 issue of Commonweal arrived on old fashioned but much-appreciated paper. The quote is from Joseph A. McCartin's piece on the most recent mortal threat to labor unions. That would be Justice Sam Alito's 5-4 essay that effectively kills the states' power to make non-union employees to pay a fee (less than full dues) to unions for negotiating labor contracts covering them.

 Just another nail in the coffin of our democratic republic. If it is to be saved, there are exciting times ahead. I am almost sad to know I won't be around to see how it is done  and maybe help to do it.


 
 What Justice Alito -- not the finest-grade mahogany on the bench -- bought into was a simple argument against union fees. I heard it many, many times when lobbyists and others met with editorial boards on which I served. Everyone I heard it from wore a Hugo Boss suit or better. None wore a denim work shirt and cloth cap. Which is strange when you realize that it is the latter on whose behalf the case was being  made.

  The case, very simply: It interferes with Joe Lunchbucket’s God-given First Amendment right to speak for himself if you make him settle for the socialistic provisions of a union contract when he could, on his own, negotiate much better pay, vacation and working conditions from Consolidated Everything Inc. its accountants and lobbyists and talk radio. Joe Lunchbucket has free speech rights, which must be preserved against union bosses, just as Consolidated Everything Inc., being a person, has rights to be preserved against union bosses (and stockholders). Since money is speech, and CEI has tons of it, Joe’s right to speak for himself is all the more precious.


 McCartin noted that we have come a long way from Pope Leo XII protecting the rights of workers to organize to Sam Alito protecting whatever:
 

Like our forebears in the era of Rerum novarum, we now face the challenge of articulating principles and devising practical mechanisms that can build a more humane and democratic world. Our urgent task is to revitalize what they bequeathed us—both our moral tradition and the tool of collective bargaining that this tradition did so much to legitimize. It is difficult to imagine how we can tame the most destructive features of today’s capitalism and preserve a robust democracy without reviving workers’ ability to bargain collectively.

The other points in that top quote also bear notice. It is not by accident (as Andrei Gromyko used to say) that cases of outlandish gerrymandering abound in today's courts. Plaintiffs claim that their votes are being cancelled or washed out by groups of people whose votes lawmaker sometimes make no bones about trying to wash out. (Are you there, Kris Kobach, esq.?)

 Nor is it by accident that -- even as the compilers of the unemployment rate find no one home because everyone is at work -- real wages remain stuck where they were decades ago.

 There is a lot of interesting work to be done to rejuvenate representative government. Benjamin Franklin was afraid the effort of self-government would prove too distracting for people and that they would find themselves a tyrant to take the work off their hands. Maybe.

 The chapter I expect to miss will be loud and gory but, I leave this hope, exhilarating.