The Wagner Act only lasted without major revision for 12 years and the passage of Taft Hartley.
Hardly as solid as libs will try and sell the people.
The War on Workers is going on a 50-state tour. Ever since Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers back on August 5th, 1981, and appointed labor-hostile Raymond Donovan as the first anti-labor Secretary of Labor in our nation's history, there’s been a War on Workers in America. While worker productivity has skyrocketed since Reagan stepped foot inside the White House, wages have remained stagnant.
And the remnants of Reagan's War on Workers have been so successful - even during Democratic administrations - that it’s not just keeping wages flat, it’s even starting to erode them. Since 2000, average worker take-home pay has been on a steady freefall, while pay for executives and CEO’s has soared off the charts. Thus, on the federal level, the War on Workers has been a huge success.
But while the War on Workers has been steadily eating away at the income of working-class Americans, its ultimate goal is to turn America’s activist working middle-class into a dispirited, disheartened, and disempowered working poor-class. To do that, the forces behind the War on Workers have to shift their focus to the state level, and do away with the last remaining state protections for workers.
As soon as they stepped in office, those same Republicans, with a little nudging from groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC, began introducing bill after bill, which ate way at workers’ rights, and gave more power to their employers.
Take Republicans in Wyoming for example. In 2011, they introduced a bill that would have allowed restaurants to force their servers to pool their tips. The tips would then be redistributed among the non-serving staff. In most states, tipped workers are paid an hourly wage that is under the minimum wage, because the thinking is that they’ll make up the rest of the money with tips. Meanwhile, regular staff members are paid the minimum wage.
But, under the Wyoming legislation, by having servers pool their tips, and redistributing those tips to non-serving staff members, you would avoid having to pay non-serving staff members the minimum wage. The result? More poor working people! Basically, Republicans in Wyoming wanted employers to be able to take away money that their employees had rightfully earned.
A year earlier in Florida, Republicans tried to pass legislation that would have prevented any “county, municipality, or political subdivision of the state” from passing laws that were designed to cut down on wage theft. Meanwhile, Indiana, Mississippi, and Florida have all passed laws banning local governments from raising the minimum wage. And the list goes on.
All across America, conservative lawmakers are doing everything in their power to quash working-class Americans, thus destroying the integrity and vitality of our democracy by turning the middle class into the working poor. A functioning democracy requires a strong and functioning middle-class.
And despite what conservatives will try to tell you, unrestrained capitalism is not going to get us there, because unrestrained capitalism always produces a working poor-class, and not a strong middle-class.
To get a middle class, you must combine capitalism with government regulation and safety-net programs. It's really just that simple, and history tells the story over and over again. Instead of following the Kochs like sheep, Michiganders and the rest of us should be working to put back into place the federal and state protections that protected workers for years and thus built America's once-strong middle class.
We need to put back into place laws and policies that balance the powers of employers and employees, and let workers unionize. Only then will we once again have a strong and flourishing American middle class.
() The War on Workers is going on a 50-state tour. Ever since Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers back on August 5th, 1981, and appointed labor-hostile Raymond Donovan as the first anti-labor Secretary of Labor in our nation's history, there
www.thomhartmann.com
www.usmessageboard.com
www.jpost.com
