According to recent polling data, Americans support collective bargaining. A New York Times/CBS poll showed that a majority of Americans oppose weakening collective bargaining rights of public employees. As the Washington Post reported, even people who don’t have union members in their household felt strongly that collective bargaining rights should be protected. “We are a fair-minded people,” commented one analyst. The public may want to reduce government spending but not at the expense of democratic decision-making.
Other polls find similar support for public workers, suggesting that the Republicans may be in a bit of a bind. One commentator on NPR likened Governor Walker’s predicament to that of a man running towards the edge of a cliff. “His actions make no sense unless you realize there’s a tiger chasing him.” The tiger, he pointed out, is the Tea Party. As far as he could tell, Republicans have one of two choices: commit political suicide by going after unions or face down the Tea Party and be eviscerated at the next election. Either way, it looks pretty messy.
The problem with the tiger metaphor is that it assumes that the Tea Party is a singular body with a clearly defined agenda. It’s not. A better metaphor might be a swarm of bees. The Tea Party is a collection of bodies alive with a sense of what they can do. Last year at this time, folks were gathering all over the nation, hoisting their placards and shouting into bullhorns. Some of their claims were complete nonsense, but the fact that so many people were listening was, to put it mildly, exhilarating.
The reason so many Tea Partiers were abuzz with energy has to do with the simple biological fact that human beings feel stronger when they meet other people who think the same way they do. We thrive when we meet someone else who hates the same president we hate, who loves the same football team we love, and who hopes as we do that a certain television personality will run for public office. The content of the thoughts hardly matters. The buzz comes from sharing similar likes and dislikes, similar hopes and fears.
This became clear to me last spring when I sat in on a Tea Party meeting in western Pennsylvania, a few days before Congress voted to pass the President’s health care bill. The conversation wasn’t particularly substantive. No one felt called upon to discuss the specifics of the bill. What mattered was defining what they loved and what they feared. For this group, the Christian Motorcycle Association and its facility with handguns was an object of great love. Obama and his socialist minions were objects of great fear. The more the group shared their love for God-loving and gun-toting motorcyclists, the happier they felt. The more the group shared their rage about Obamacare, the tighter they felt. Solidarity was developed through feelings, not substance.
What is true for Tea Parties is true for other nascent social movements. The bonding first occurs on an emotional level as bodies start to form alliances based on mutual likes and dislikes. Workers first begin to organize themselves because of shared unhappiness in the workplace. “Did you see what the boss’s son is driving? How come I have to ride the bus?” The workers share stories of friends who were suddenly let go and mothers, widowed by industrial accidents, who can’t put food on the table. Eventually, a leader emerges and the buzz begins to take shape. Once the workers have organized themselves into a union, however, they become a formidable opponent, as formidable as any tiger.
But it’s not just leaders that turn a swarm of bees into a formidable tiger. Rules must be in place so that decision-making procedures are transparent. Institutions must be in place so that members have a chance to express what they see and what they have learned. Mechanisms need to be in place for workers to address safety concerns, grievance procedures, equitable wages, and opportunities for advancement. Collective bargaining is the umbrella term for those mechanisms. Union leaders, exhilarated by their own power, sometimes forget that their strength derives from these mechanisms. At times, they fall under the logic of the swarm, believing they must be right because the people closest to them happened to agree.
The fact that a majority of Americans support collective bargaining suggests that we recognize just how important formalized decision-making processes are to the political process. Without collective bargaining, the political maturity of a group is stunted. Sure, bees experience the visceral pleasure of being part of something dangerous and alive, but tigers choose their steps cautiously, based on a lifetime of difficult circumstances. Having reflected and deliberated, the tiger can look the boss straight in the eye and say, “No, we won’t work under those conditions.”
My guess is that the governor of Wisconsin already knows the Tea Party is no tiger. He’s hovering at the edge because he wants the real tiger, the power of collective bargaining, to grab him by the neck, sending them both to their deaths. Walker no doubt believes that the billionaires Charles and David Koch, who contributed $43,000 to his 2010 campaign, will be able to bring him back to life. But the tiger can’t die as long as bodies organize themselves into self-reflective organisms, capable of setting long-term goals through democratic decision-making.
The Republican establishment wants us to think that the Tea Party is as strong as people can become, but a majority of Americans still know better. Somewhere in our national cellular structure, we recognize the difference between tigers and bees. Somewhere in the recesses of our collective imagination, we know that better decisions are made when well-organized groups, practiced in the art of self-reflection, sit down at the bargaining table and work things out together.
Perhaps collective bargaining is not a positive strategy in public-sector unions. Individuals who work in the public sector are already part of a collective: the voters. It is as members of the voting Republic that they can form a cohesive body.
ReplyDeleteIn the private sector, when an individual is working for a company she—unless she owns stock—has little, if any, ability to direct/affect policy. This is a situation were forming a union become useful; instead of each body being a bee (which may sting from time-to-time, but when properly handled mostly makes honey), bodies can come together into the collective body of a tiger. This new body can direct and affect in a place where smaller bodies are, if not powerless, insignificant threat.
The public sector is different, because individuals that work in it already exert influence as voters in the collective the makes up the government. The tiger can exist without a union because it is democratic decision-making. If anything, a public sector union gets in the way of democratic decision-making, as the individuals making up the body of the union expand their power at the expense of the voting-collective.
It is not just union leaders, but the entire union the becomes deluded and exhilarated by its power. Public sector employs should not look the boss in the eye and declare their refusal, rather they should take their dissatisfaction to the ballot box.
Does any of that make sense? Not in a swaying argument way, but in a comprehensible argument way...
Thanks for this comment, Elias. I think you're making a valid argument about the distinction between public and private employees. Theoretically, public employees could find a different candidate if they don't like the terms offered by the current office holder.
ReplyDeleteThe fact of the matter is that in the post-Fordist economy, unions are quickly disappearing. The one place where they've held on is in the public sector. In that sense, and I don't think I made this clear enough in my column, the practice of collective bargaining is a practice that public employees continue to employ and that, according to the polls, the rest of the country doesn't want to lose. Not because Americans necessarily want their cops and teachers to look the boss in the eye but because we want to remember how collective bargaining works should the conditions for its deployment be needed.
(Sorry to be so long getting back to these comments. Ah, the life of a blogger who doesn't have internet at home...)