Why are Scott Walker and the Republican Party afraid of unions?
Why are Scott Walker and the Republican Party afraid of unions? Certainly they are because they want to kill them? Rarely do people kill things that they do not fear in some way. The answer may have to do with why unions exist. There is a long and deep question. One for any entire course, but we will do it in shorthand, a few paragraphs, a sketch.
Unions grew for two reasons. First, workers found they were enslaved in the sense that the freedom offered by the farm and its self-sufficiency was gone. As wage earners their time was spent working to earn and not to grow the necessities of life and living. That earning made them dependent just as Thomas Jefferson had feared. No longer was their life or their views their own. A point of disagreement with their employer led to no job, no wage, and poverty even death. The union offered through the banding together as way to regain some of the independence the farm had offered. Second, capitalism is a nasty philosophy. It is built on competition. In competition someone wins and someone loses. The owner and/or manager wins by driving his workers to make the most money. Ironically we still today pride ourselves on productivity. Yet for the owner and manager the productivity is all from the worker and none comes from them. The union provides a counter to owner and manager. It allows the worker to claim a more rightful share of their own work, their productivity.
The short answers to the question then are Walker and the Republicans fear unions for exposing their own lack of self-sufficiency. They are dependent on the worker. They can earn no money without the worker. To hide that fact they seek to denigrate the worker and all that they do. Workers just like slaves must be driven, workers always demand more than they are entitled to, and thus they deserve to be diminished. All to stroke the fragile ego of the owner and manager who would have nothing without the worker. Second, Ricardo’s Iron Law of wages demands that the worker be paid as little as possible because success is measured by the largest profit. As Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang and a hundred others have pointed out, for the owner and manager the worker is just another input.
In these views Walker and the Republicans of his ilk today harken back more than a hundred years. To a time when globalization was a vague idea and imperialism was in vogue. A time when national companies were on the edge of thought. A time that was much simpler than today, less connected and intertwined and far less technical and sophisticated in the requirements of its workers. Today workers are not replaceable components if you want to be a world power. They are not replaceable if you want a growing economy rather than a failing one. But the Walker types cannot understand that reality. All they see it the boss who controls all because he or she has power. This view fails all the tests of modern time. It is why revolutions are occurring across the north of Africa. Human dignity demands acceptance and not domination. The Walkers and their cronies cannot deal with negotiation, they only know their way.
