Holy Crap! I found a great Thom Hartmann article that will explain exactly why the GOP hates labor/unions.
ThomHartmann.com - McKinley or Roosevelt? This Election is as Much About the Past as the Future
Little tidbits:
From the Gilded Age to the Great Depression to today, the economic agenda of conservatives has been easily summarized in two words: "cheap labor."
Unions have been a bulwark of the middle class ever since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Prior to RooseveltÂ’s 1935 Wagner Act, which guaranteed workers' rights to unionize, America had been mostly either very rich or very poor.
At the founding of America, the closest we'd had to a middle class was the "plowmanry" class Jefferson exalted - small family farmers – who were a major force in American politics from the time of the Revolution until the Civil War. But the industrialization of America, and the formation of huge agricultural monopolies made possible by rail transportation, began to wipe out the farming middle class (leading to the progressive Grange movement in the late 1800s), and from that time until 1935 America was increasingly a Dickensian nation of richer and poorer, with a rapidly vanishing middle class.
Workers protested, but conservatives of the Gilded Age held both economic and political power. Eleven workers were murdered in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 when the B&O Railroad cut wages: That year only three national unions existed, and all were under siege.
In 1886, Boston police fired into a crowd of protestors – part of 340,000 strikers nationwide – who were calling for a change in the national workday from 12 hours to 8. One Boston worker died in the hail of police gunfire that injured scores of others, and four labor leaders were hanged, seriously crippling the union movement.
Of the 12 million working families in America in the census of 1890, the average income for 11 million of them was $380/year (equivalent to about $7900 today), keeping them deep in poverty. In 1893, federal troops did battle with railroad strikers in 26 states, breaking a national strike and sending labor leaders to prison. Eleven years later, while the majority of American workers were still desperately poor, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish made society headlines by throwing a dinner party for her dog, who made a grand entrance wearing a $15,000 diamond collar.
Following the Wagner Act's implementation, and RooseveltÂ’s raising of the top marginal income tax rate on multi-millionaires to 90 percent, however, the first true American middle class came into being.
But in 1947 the cheap-labor conservatives fought back. In the elections of 1946, Democrats lost control of both the U.S. House and the Senate, allowing Republican legislators to push through the Taft-Hartley bill, which essentially allowed individual states to opt out of portions of the Wagner act. It was an early domestic version of the "free trade" disaster we're seeing now with NAFTA and GATT/WTO - a race to the cheap labor bottom - that started to take root in the American south right after passage of Taft-Hartley. Although President Harry Truman vetoed the Taft-Hartley assault on labor, Republicans in the House and Senate overrode his veto and it became law.
From then until the end of the Jimmy Carter presidency, unionization - and, thus, average worker wages in the United States - only gradually declined. When Ronald Reagan came into office, a quarter of the American workforce was unionized, meaning half of Americans could raise a middle-class family on a single salary.
But then Reagan declared war on the middle class, starting with the air traffic controller's union (PATCO) during his first year in office. The conservative assault on labor has been unrelenting since then: Today only about 8 percent of the private-sector American workforce is unionized, and at the same time Education Secretary Rod Paige described the teachers' union as a "terrorist organization," George W. Bush announced plans to lay off over 700,000 unionized government employees and replace them with non-union "contractors."
While gutting the American middle class, conservatives also launched a well-funded propaganda campaign - using right-wing "think tanks" and talk radio - to convince workers that their growing economic woes were the fault of minorities ("affirmative action") and the poor ("welfare queens"). At the same time, they began stacking federal benches with conservative judges, and passing thousands of federal, state, and local laws, ordinances, and regulations that further weakened the powers of organized labor and their ability to unionize.
It's just fine, they said, for capital to organize in the form of a corporation. It's great when corporations organize into trade associations, chambers of commerce, industry groups, and lobbying consortiums. But to have workers organize to level the playing field? Inconceivable.
The result has been an explosion in CEO and executive pay, a rush of wealth to the conservative elite (the top 10 percent of Americans now own 71 percent of the nationÂ’s wealth), and this year's cut in taxes to a maximum 15 percent for those who "earn their living" by sitting around the pool waiting for their dividend checks to arrive.
See, this is from 2004, so don't tell us liberals that we didn't warn you all!!!
ThomHartmann.com - McKinley or Roosevelt? This Election is as Much About the Past as the Future
Seriously, read the whole thing and tell me how Thom is wrong. Not if he's wrong, how.
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