Facing the privatization of Akron, Ohio's sewer system and the potential loss of their jobs, Akron public workers in 2008 used the slogan Save Our Sewers and focused on potential water contamination in their successful campaign to defeat the plan.
The focus of the campaign was not on saving their jobs, but what privatization would mean for the entire community. The idea being that we're all in it together.
The Akron effort was cited this Saturday in Bellevue at a workshop held by organizers from the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees who are battling Ohio's union busting Senate Bill 5. The bill would criminalize strikes and drastically reduce collective bargaining rights of public sector unions including the right to negotiate about the kind of privatization the Akron workers fought.
"Our message has got to be, 'Save our community,'" George Embleton, an AFSCME field education coordinator from Boston, told the audience of about 30 public and private union members. "We are now in a fight back mode."
AFSCME organizers recognize that while there is sympathy for public workers given the heavy-handed tactics being used against them in Ohio and around the nation, there is also resentment. Many non-union workers are unsympathetic after years of wage stagnation and givebacks on healthcare and other benefits.
Just 11.9 percent of American workers are unionized and just 6.9 percent in the private sector.http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
Most workers under 30 have never been in a union. As a journalist, I remember a 20-something co-worker at a Connecticut newspaper asking me, "What's a scab?" when we were discussing a strike at a local business.
Pensions have become a thing of the past for most workers. They're lucky if they can get 401 (k) plans which are subject to the Wall Street rollercoaster and have never lived up to the promises made when they were introduced as replacements for pensions some 30 years ago.
"You brothers and sisters in the private sector have been feeling this for 20 years," Embleton said. "Right now there are 27 states where right to work laws or anti-labor laws are being proposed. I don't like to hear about conspiracies, but it sure sounds like a conspiracy."
Republican governors like Ohio's John Kasich, Wisconsin's Scott Walker and New Jersey's Chris Christie have used budget deficits their party helped create with tax cuts and tax caps as an excuse to eviscerate unions. AFSCME, the Service Employees International Union and the National Education Association are the among the top 10 donors to politicians and nearly all of their money goes to Democrats.
Busting unions would eliminate the last counterweight to corporations and the Republicans who do their bidding. "We're in the way," Embleton said.
Of course Democrats, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, to Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer also shill for corporations and Wall Street, but not to the extreme degree of Republicans. And Democrats like the Indiana and Wisconsion state senators who left their states to prevent passage of union busting bills, have shown the spine that national Democrats like Obama lack.
Embleton and Dan Ford, an AFSCME political coordinator from Toledo, are helping organize a petition drive for a ballot initiative to defeat SB 5 which narrowly passed in the Ohio State Senate and is expected to pass soon in the House of Representatives where Republicans have a majority. Ford said he's confident SB 5 opponents can get the approximatel 260,000 signatures - 6 percent of the votes cast in the 2010 election -necessary for the ballot initiative. The signatures must come from at least 3 percent of voters in 44 of Ohio's 88 counties, Ford said.
Getting a ballot initiative and overturning SB 5 will require improving communication with an often apathetic and easily swayed public. It will mean breaking down stereotypes of corrupt union leaders and lazy, overpaid union workers. The kind of stereotypes reactionaries have sucessfully used to split and divide the public in the past.
It can be a tough sell. How do you convince someone that their tax dollars should help pay for decent healthcare for public workers when that person doesn't have a pension or decent healthcare? "The answer is you should have it too," Embleton said.
The emphasis should be on increasing wages and benefits for all workers, not decreasing them for the few workers who have decent wages and benefits. We need to stress that union wages help improve wages for non-union workers in the same way the minimum wage helps raise wages for everyone. A rising tide lifts all boats.
We need to stress that that public workers aren't overpaid. They actually earn slightly less in total compensation than their private sector counterparts. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/debunking_the_myth_of_the_overcompensated_public_employee
And most important, we must debunk the myth that government is always bad or incompetent. Embleton analogized it to an iceberg with the public only seeing what's above the water. That most people don't comprehend that government is bridges, roads and street lights. And that government is people: cops, firefighters, nurses, postal workers, soldiers and teachers.
Mock coupons were handed out to give to local business people to show how much public workers spend in the community and the ripple effect slashing their wages and benefits will have on the local economy. The audience was urged to write anti-SB 5 letters to local politicians and local newspapers.
Defeating SB 5 will be an uphill battle. As Embleton noted, Washington D.C. lobbyists like Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot who bragged about drowning government like a baby in a bathtub http://www.1-love-quotes.com/quote/925045about meet with politicians each day to push for dismantling government and unions.
"We're sitting in front of our 50-inch T.V. enjoying the game while they're eating our lunch," Embleton said.
Despite the odds, the audience left energized. If it takes going door to door for signatures, talking to our neighbors, writing letters to the editor or facing off with politicans, we'll do it. If we go down, we go down fighting.We're all in it together.
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