Response Ability

Most of the relevant analysis on this has been done: Ezra Klein’s piece (and update) in the Washington Post, Paul Krugman’s recent piece in the New York Times, and Susan Estrich’s from Creator’s Syndicate, and I would refer readers to those for the more complete analyses (although Krugman’s I have a few nits to pick about).

Our often shallow culture, and its often shallow media, paint simplistically matters that are often complex. Certainly the ideological trumpeters (two writers from the Washington Post come to mind; they’re great minds, but pick and choose their “facts”) often cannot be relied upon to give us much more than things to look into to find out the fuller story. They often certainly don’t see any larger patterns except those they have construed or constructed. I hope that my training as political scientist, historian, accountant, financial analyst, logistician, and military officer have given me a wide enough perspective, but the limitations of the human condition undoubtedly create flaws in my own perception too.

Let’s begin this blog piece with the statements that Wisconsin’s (and by implication all states’ and even the feds’) public-sector workers (including teachers) are making more than private-sector workers: More than the “average” employed private-sector person? Yes. More than employed fellow professionals with equal education and training? Usually no, and often less.

Traditionally, working in government was a recognized trade-off: you earned less than the private sector, but your job was a bit more secure (less competition in the strict sense), your pension and benefits more consistent and floored, you got more time off (holidays in particular), and the work was usually not as all-consuming or arduous as it often was in the private sector, and general working conditions adequate and tolerable.

Over time, several forces, but two main ones, changed that. The first was that the hyper-competitive, hyper-capitalism became exploitative, and the private sector’s middle and working classes, in every “downturn,” had their salaries and benefits cut in “cost-saving” measures, and many jobs and places of work were eliminated entirely or shipped overseas. This, combined with other changes, drove wealth upward, and decoupled that class, which was having itself do very well, from the others who more and more weren’t (and more and more of them). Once common pensions and benefits were “sacrificed” for the “good of the company” (often really only the good of the stockholders, the major stockholders, although some smaller companies really did need the breathing space to survive) and permanently (despite promises that things were only for the short-term). The well paid upper levels, already getting generous stock options and other bonuses, also could easily afford to maximize the voluntary savings plans (lobbied for by Wall Street) that replaced the pensions, while the steadily ratcheted down lower level workers couldn’t afford enough, even when they could resist the consumptive allure of a consumption society (and a consumption-mania in everything—houses, cars, gadgets, etc.—often pushed by the same Corporate America that had changed the consumer’s workplace).

Take enough “crises,” ‘shocks,” “downturns,” and recessions, and the private sector became transformed. Now, not all of this was twisted; certainly, as the rest of the world fully recovered from WW2, recovered from economically foolish ideologies, and also took advantage of higher-tech possibilities and market congruence, there was going to be strong competition and some adjustments. But little like the manner or extent that occurred.

Regardless, the private-sector now had, in the main, an entirely new baseline, and pensions and benefits weren’t significantly, except for a few privileged places (mostly companies of the Consortium industries), in the picture, and wages and salaries had been driven low.

In the public sector, the drive to pay more to attract talent had been going on for quite a while, although the teaching profession had largely been left out of this. Our political system tends to induce short-term behavior with escapable consequences for the instigators, and our unwillingness to deal in reality or to endure self-inflicted, but necessary, pain meant that the public sector often got into unsustainable mode about benefits and budgets in general. The public-sector, sometimes from our excessive expectations of what we wanted from it, but certainly from political sweetenings and maneuverings as well, got a bit bloated (and often a lot bloated) in numbers and benefits. At the same time it became very attractive for many private sector workers, who, looking at their bleak salaries, benefits, and prospects, flocked to the public sector. This was an unuttered cry that something was deeply wrong with the private sector, but few noticed.

Fewer still noticed how utterly unsustainable everything about this was: Large numbers of formerly economically productive people were consigned to effective serfdom or even just abandoned entirely; everything about the system (economics, politics, law, international agreements) was slanted to drive wealth upward to the truly wealthy while allowing them to escape more and more taxation and responsibility or fraternity; and the public sector became highly attractive in comparison (and often even the last hope for those who had no decent options left anymore). And so now the clouds swirled in for the perfect storm of unsustainable insanity: many economic producers had been entirely removed from the system, and many of the remaining had been economically weakened, while those who had benefitted abstained from helping; and the economic non-producers (governments by definition) were increased and bloated precisely when there were fewer producers, and those who had the money (many not really “producers”) keeping more and more of that money as time went on. Continuous and unsustainable wholescale borrowing (the transfer of wealth and power to those who make better decisions), fostered the illusion of escapable consequences and perpetuation for awhile, but the loud thunder can already be heard now by all but the deaf.

Yet these larger and more relevant matters are lost in ideological warfare, while the true power centers get what they want: the steady enfeebling of the people’s creatures—their local, state, and federal governments—because those power centers know those governments are the only recognizable latent threats to them.

Back to the specifics in Wisconsin: Pension and health care cost increases for employees have already essentially been agreed to, with the unions virtually agreeing to what the governor proposed in those instances to help with the budget. Now, did many of them do so only after collective bargaining was threatened? Yes, and they deserve criticism for their selfish parochialism. But it was no mere threat. This “crisis,” part of which has been manufactured, is being used to remove the last remnants that can potentially resist (although unions cannot threaten them) the power centers (who provided enormous amounts of money in the election). Sure, the extent of the proposed removal of collective bargaining has been exaggerated or misreported (benefits bargaining would be removed, but wages bargaining might be left, although probably not bargaining for anything more than cost of inflation, and what is included in that cost of inflation, is, well, not in the influence of the wage bargainers). All manner of wedges would be also be driven into union membership across the board, but particularly in public union membership (private union membership in the nation has been driven so low that it is largely only concentrated in the trades now; not much “backbone” left in the middle class). Some of these wedges even look on the face of them to be pretty reasonable, but behind this apparent rationality lurks deep ideological and economic warfare designed to chip away at a palisade (unions) defending against unfettered power. As anyone (probably retired by now) who has worked in union and non-union places, particularly manufacturing, can tell you, while unions are sometimes contentious, petty, or maddening organizations, they do provide a recourse to supervisors who get out of hand or take a personal disliking to you, and to management and owner-stockholders who start to see you as necessary evils, see you as organic units to get the most work from while paying the least amount to, and having the fewest of you as well.

The idea that the voters elected Walker to do “what he said,” implying that he said much of anything substantial about the unions—is fallacious, a carefully planted smokescreen. In fact, some of his campaign ads featured union members, in a sort of “let’s get together and bridge our differences” portrayal. Academics have canvassed his campaign ads, his campaign website, his debates, and his public speeches, and found little of substance on the matter, and certainly nothing that could be said to be “the focus.” What little there was dealt with pension and health care funding, and that’s already been agreed to, so he’s already done what the voters elected him to do, hasn’t he? As for the rest of what Walker did promise and what he has done, I refer you to the pieces mentioned in the first paragraph, but collective bargaining was not in the list of what he got elected to do something about.

As for elected officials leaving the state to disrupt quorum, again, it is highly unlikely it was about the pension and health percentages; the assault on collective bargaining probably terrorized them into some action, similar to when legislators in Texas fled the state when illegal gerrymandering was being ram-rodded through. This gets into issues of minority protections vs. majority rule, and those are VERY complicated, and related to another topic of how we expect far too much out of a system that is by its design (if it is working properly) so power-fractured as to hinder accomplishment, not foster it.

The problems of Wisconsin are not all that different from most other states: the cost drivers of pressures on state budgets are largely Medicaid, prisons, and general aid to local schools (funded in a large manner by directly marked personal property taxes) and governments, and then and only then salaries and benefits. But all of them are going up, for various reasons, and bottom line reality is that government is not a producer, it is a consumer. Higher education, by the way, because it is, unlike local education, a quasi-governmental hybrid partially funded by the users, by contributors, and by the state, often gets cut to make up the shortfall, another robbing of the future to satisfy the present (a practice we Americans are now infamous for nationwide). And the pressures become intense because corporations and the ultra-wealthy largely abstain from effective funding. Unsustainable decisions on both the funding and spending pieces of the budget equation thus make for perpetual crises that don’t happen in a vacuum. All of the above are why many or even all sides can be “right” in some way or ways.

And there is waste in government, and much that can be cut, but the specifics are never easy, and if you take the large drivers—Medicaid, prisons, aid to local schools and governments—off the table, you don’t have enough leeway to fix the problem. Americans need a real hard look at their choices of what they NEED government to do, and an equally hard look at realistically funding that from all appropriate sources. Government must not become too big, and yet also must not become too weak, but more than anything, we need to make it sustainable.

There is a general pattern of national anti-union press promoted by the power centers. The auto companies were reputed to have “gone under” because of the unions, and any academic who looks into the matter will tell you that is mostly false, that bad (often arrogant, stupid, and selfish) management, and failure to meet competition, were the driving forces, and union desires at best only a contributor.

Stepping back from all this loud noise, the litmus question is, as nearly always: has doing what is proposed in the past made the majority of us better off? Even if academic journals like the Journal of Labor Research didn’t indicate it, our own awareness would show us that labor’s loss of power has lopsided the economic equation and most are not better off, and many are worse off, far worse.

Issues should not be conflated. Teachers didn’t cause the budget shortfall, and even the measures agreed to won’t make the majority of it back. And really, if we want to put unions on the spot, have them come up with their own detailed plan to deal with projected deficits, and compare to what’s already been proposed. Isn’t that one of the basic principles of resolution?