The Chronicle Review: The Long History of Labor Bashing
By Nelson Lichtenstein
When he was still President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, now mayor-elect of Chicago, famously quipped: “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.”
Republican governors in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, and other states have certainly taken that advice to heart. By emphasizing, and in some cases manipulating, the red ink flowing through so many state budgets, they have leveraged the crisis to strike a body blow at the public-sector unions that represent so many teachers, professors, social workers, and municipal employees. The collective-bargaining rights of the police and firefighters, often a privileged caste, are also being threatened in some states.
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