CLT UPDATE
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Union clout fading with membership
decline
When the House voted a few minutes later, just 46
members supported the bill, a top union priority for the thousands of
jobs casinos would bring. Afterward, House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi
crowed over labor's defeat, praising House members for withstanding
"incredible pressure" from unions....
It would be a mistake to suggest that labor unions have lost their power
in Massachusetts politics - just ask Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who has
been fighting for months with firefighters over drug and alcohol
testing, or any school committee struggling with its latest teachers
contract....
And while union power remains most concentrated in working-class cities,
most Massachusetts legislators represent suburban districts, said
[Philip Johnston, former chairman of the state Democratic Party].
"I think organized labor generally is not as influential, or their
presence isn't felt as strongly, in suburban districts as it is in urban
districts," he said.
Teachers unions are an important exception to that rule, but they did
not go all out in the casino fight.
The Boston Globe
Monday, March 24, 2008
Casino vote is a blow to labor
Weakened role in politics seen
Union membership in Massachusetts last year dropped to its
lowest level in almost two decades as one of the country's most steadfast
collective-bargaining states continues to replace old-line jobs in manufacturing
with salaried occupations in technology and professional services.
The number of workers in the Commonwealth who belonged to a union declined last
year by 35,000 to hit a 19-year-low of 379,000, according to data released
yesterday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics....
The percentage of Massachusetts workers who are in unions - a more important
measure because it adjusts for a state's job losses or gains - fell to 13.2
percent of the state's workers, down from 14.5 percent in 2006....
The state's concentration of teaching and healthcare jobs, however, helped
offset a larger decline in union membership last year and may continue to do so
in the next few years. The Massachusetts Teachers Association, the largest union
in the state, continued its four-year growth streak by gaining 3,349 members
last year to a total of 107,510 members in June. "Our membership is still going
up at this point," said the union's president, Anne Wass.
The Boston Globe
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Union membership in state drops
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Commonwealth's
largest union, has decided to get into bed with Governor Slots and the
fabulously profitable gambling industry in backing three alleged "destination
resort" casinos. The state's teachers, of all people, should know better. After
all, they knew Richard Anzivino all too well. If the teachers union gets its
way, there will soon be many more pathetic - and costly - losers just like him
calling Massachusetts home....
Anne Wass, president of the teachers union, doesn't put a fine point on it: "We
need the revenues for our schools." She calls Anzivino a personnel situation she
would rather not discuss; he is inconvenient, no question about it. "If somebody
has an addiction problem, they are going to find a way to do it," she told me.
The Boston Globe
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Teach the children
By Steve Bailey
We looked at some of the main "budget busters" and asked
Finance Committee Vice Chairwoman Marty Ragones and Barbara Anderson,
director of Citizens for Limited Taxation to comment. In reviewing the
budget, generally the budget compares costs from fiscal 2004 to 2009.
Salaries and wages, the largest component of the operating budget for all three
cost centers, shows a greater than 5 percent average annual increase during this
period for the non-override budget and more than a 6 percent annual increase for
the level staff budget. And from fiscal 2003 to 2009, in total health insurance
increased 92 percent and pensions, 95 percent....
It’s hard to say no to local unions especially if they have amateurs negotiators
against professional union negotiators, added Anderson. "The state is going to
have to give some help to towns in these negotiations. The towns got taken and
now they are stuck and asking for overrides from people also living with the
economic downtown.
"My hope is they say no," Anderson added. "Somebody has to reform the public
employee benefit system before we all drown in unfunded liabilities. Public
sector employees are doing a lot better than the private sector in salaries, pay
raises and benefits."
Anderson compared the increase in salaries and benefits to automotive industry
workers in Detroit. "They talked themselves out of jobs because of salaries and
benefits," she said.
The Sudbury Town Crier
Friday, February 8, 2008
A look at the budget busters
With a string of recent organized-labor outrages, what was
once a fairy-tale notion in Massachusetts—hard-core union-busting—may become a
reality in today’s dire fiscal times. All we need is the right demagogue....
Formed to prevent the powerful from preying upon the powerless, our public
employee unions have themselves become the powerful—their incessant wails for
“fairness” are minor masterpieces of Orwellian doublespeak—and it’s the rest of
us who are powerless against the flabbergastingly senseless status quo they
spend their days defending. With municipalities more reliant on rising property
taxes than they’ve been in 25 years, and unions squashing anything that would
help cut costs or increase efficiency, I started to wonder whether we’re
approaching a time when voter anger will outweigh union clout, and politicians
will be able to take a stand without being carted off in pails afterward....
“They are just greedy beyond comprehension,” says David
Tuerck, Suffolk University economist and head of the Beacon Hill Institute. “And
I don’t think it can be explained anymore by political [power]. It’s just a
failure on the part of politicians to think through their own self-interest.”
...
“There is a collision course,” says Michael Widmer, head of the Massachusetts
Taxpayers Foundation, “between the long-standing power of the public employee
unions on one hand, and the inability of state and local governments to continue
to support the benefit structures, the health and pension plans, on the other.
That reality is, I think, forcing this issue to the surface.”
Boston Magazine
December 2007
Fate of the Unions
By Joe Keohane
Chip Ford's CLT Commentary
It appears that not only are unions losing membership
but once-feared clout as well, and none too soon. The ignominious
defeat of Gov. Patrick's resort casinos plan was another major set-back
for the governor, but it was a bigger crushing of Big Union. House
Speaker DiMasi took on not only the governor but the state's most
powerful unions: the AFL-CIO, Teamsters, and even the
Massachusetts Teachers Association. Once inconceivable, the allied
unions' demand was rejected and went down in flames last week.
Private sector union membership is gliding in
hopefully for a crash landing, both here in Massachusetts and across the
nation. Public sector unions are still holding their own -- only
the state teachers union is growing, which explains the ceaseless need
statewide for Proposition ˝ overrides "for the children." In every
instance, the largest cost of any municipal budget is the school side of
its budget -- and most of that goes straight into school personnel
salaries and benefits.
In his Boston Herald column ("When
unions fail children," Jan. 24, 2005), Charles D. Chieppo of the
Pioneer Institute wrote:
About 90 percent of Massachusetts state employees
are unionized, compared to 35 percent of state employees across the
country. Approximately one of 10 private sector employees in the
commonwealth belongs to a union. Of the 20 political action
committees that gave the most to candidates for Massachusetts state
and county offices during the 2002 election cycle, 16 were unions or
other labor organizations.
From 2000, the last year before the most recent recession, to 2003,
total private sector wages in Massachusetts actually decreased. But
state and local government employees had a very different
experience. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that their wages
grew by nearly 12 percent, and a 2003 BLS report found that public
employee wages in eastern Massachusetts were also 12 percent higher
than those of private employees doing comparable jobs.
During the same period, as private sector wages fell, total wages
paid to employees of K-12 public education in Massachusetts jumped
an astonishing 19 percent.
As Joe Keohane wrote in last December's issue of
Boston Magazine ("Fate of the Unions"):
With municipalities more reliant on rising
property taxes than they’ve been in 25 years, and unions squashing
anything that would help cut costs or increase efficiency, I started
to wonder whether we’re approaching a time when voter anger will
outweigh union clout, and politicians will be able to take a stand
without being carted off in pails afterward.
We voters vastly outnumber union membership, more so
by the day. Let's hope the time has finally arrived, that the
politicians and public officials continue to recognize and act on it
quickly -- before the unions take us taxpayers, the vast citizen
majority, down with them in their death throes.
The Boston Globe
Monday, March 24, 2008
Casino vote is a blow to labor
Weakened role in politics seen
By Lisa Wangsness
Democrat Ruth Balser of Newton gave the final speech on the House floor
before last week's casino vote, warning of the dangers of gambling
addiction. She said she was raised never to cross a picket line and
considered herself a good friend of labor.
"But, I have to say to the president of the AFL-CIO," she said, "Mr.
President, on this you are dead wrong."
From his seat in the gallery overlooking the House chamber, Robert
Haynes, head of the state's largest labor organization, leaned forward
in his seat and pointed toward Balser.
"No," he said quietly. "She's dead wrong."
It was a dramatic moment that captured the anger Haynes and other union
leaders felt about the House position on casinos - and their inability
to affect it. When the House voted a few minutes later, just 46 members
supported the bill, a top union priority for the thousands of jobs
casinos would bring. Afterward, House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi crowed
over labor's defeat, praising House members for withstanding "incredible
pressure" from unions.
"It was a very disappointing showing for labor," said Jeffrey M. Berry,
a political scientist at Tufts University.
It would be a mistake to suggest that labor unions have lost their power
in Massachusetts politics - just ask Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who has
been fighting for months with firefighters over drug and alcohol
testing, or any school committee struggling with its latest teachers
contract.
But the casino vote highlights the extent to which the labor community
is smaller, more fractured, and less influential in electoral politics
than it once was. It also highlights the limits union power has on
Beacon Hill.
When faced with the decision of whether to side with unions or the
powerful speaker, who controls virtually every word of every bill that
comes to the House floor, the contest was not even close.
"I think labor still has clout in general in primaries and in general
elections, and I think legislators take organized labor very seriously,
but the power of legislative leadership trumps the power of organized
labor and virtually everyone else," said Philip Johnston, former
chairman of the state Democratic Party.
And many lawmakers viewed the casino vote as a complicated issue that
could not be cast as a simple vote on jobs, despite labor's attempts to
frame it that way.
"It's one of these issues where there are lots of different
considerations - one of them is economic, but there are others as well,"
said former governor Michael S. Dukakis, pointing to concerns about the
impact of gambling addiction.
Undeniably, however, labor unions' political power in Massachusetts has
been diminished by declining union membership.
Only about 13 percent of the state's residents were union members in
2007, compared with about 25 percent in the late 1970s - reflecting a
national trend created by the loss of manufacturing jobs, the
deregulation of unionized industries, and the rise of antiunion
companies like Wal-Mart, said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for
Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.
And while union power remains most concentrated in working-class cities,
most Massachusetts legislators represent suburban districts, said
Johnston.
"I think organized labor generally is not as influential, or their
presence isn't felt as strongly, in suburban districts as it is in urban
districts," he said.
Teachers unions are an important exception to that rule, but they did
not go all out in the casino fight.
Other powerful unions like Service Employees International Union 1199, a
large and wealthy organization that represents many healthcare workers,
did not take a position. Casinos were simply not a top priority for
their members.
The unions pushing for casinos were those whose members need the kind of
jobs casinos would provide - the AFL-CIO and its building trade
affiliates, the Teamsters; and UNITE HERE, a relatively young union that
represents hotel and restaurant workers, who have little experience
lobbying legislators.
Haynes and his fellow union leaders made it clear that the vote was a
critical issue for them. At a rally on Boston Common last week, Haynes
gave an expletive-laden address ordering workers to lobby their
legislators.
The day of the vote, he sent hand-delivered letters to lawmakers warning
that opposing casinos would have "a drastic impact on your Labor Voting
Record upon which endorsements are based." Hotel and restaurant workers
crowded the all-day hearing.
"I've never seen labor go to that extent before," said Representative
Brian Wallace, a Democrat from South Boston.
Rob Gray, a Republican consultant who advised several GOP governors,
sees the casino vote as another example of the AFL-CIO's declining
power, pointing to the Democratic Party's weak showing in several recent
gubernatorial elections (though not in 2006), its failure to advance a
ballot initiative to give workers paid family leave, and its inability
to win the legalization of slot machines at racetracks.
"They don't have the oomph they used to have," he said.
But Tim Sullivan, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO, counters that his
organization has helped win important victories in recent years,
including the highest minimum wage in the nation, some of the best laws
protecting construction workers, and subsidies for healthcare for
low-wage workers in the state's health reform law.
Representative Martin J. Walsh, a Democrat from Dorchester, argues that
members were reluctant to rebel against House leadership during budget
season.
"A lot of people have things at stake for their district," he said.
After the vote, Haynes fumed that the speaker had subverted the
democratic process by strong-arming members and promised that the
AFL-CIO would look more closely at the totality of members' voting
records before offering endorsements.
The Boston Globe
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Union membership in state drops
More workers take tech, service jobs
By Nicole C. Wong
Union membership in Massachusetts last year dropped to its lowest level
in almost two decades as one of the country's most steadfast
collective-bargaining states continues to replace old-line jobs in
manufacturing with salaried occupations in technology and professional
services.
The number of workers in the Commonwealth who belonged to a union
declined last year by 35,000 to hit a 19-year-low of 379,000, according
to data released yesterday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Meanwhile, union membership nationwide was relatively flat, rising by
311,000 workers to nearly 15.7 million.
The percentage of Massachusetts workers who are in unions - a more
important measure because it adjusts for a state's job losses or gains -
fell to 13.2 percent of the state's workers, down from 14.5 percent in
2006.
Last year's numbers for the state are the lowest since the government
began collecting union membership data in 1989, but Massachusetts is
still ahead of more than three-quarters of the states. Nationwide, union
members made up 12.1 percent of employed wage and salary workers,
essentially unchanged from the prior year's 12 percent.
"The Northeast has traditionally been a stronghold for union
membership," said Walter Marshall, a regional economist at the labor
statistics agency. "It could be part of the cultural business climate,
and it could be a combination of the industries and occupations."
Labor economists say Massachusetts' decline is due in part to the larger
disappearance of manufacturing jobs and slower gain in construction
jobs. Other government data show manufacturing accounted for 9 percent
of the state's jobs last year, compared to 10.1 percent of the country's
jobs during the same period; construction amounted to 4.2 percent of the
state's jobs last year, compared to 5.5 percent nationwide. Still, this
state's situation isn't drastically different from those of others.
Union membership has been eroding nationwide since 1990 as service jobs
- in finance, information technology, and other knowledge-based
industries that usually are not unionized - have proliferated.
The state's concentration of teaching and healthcare jobs, however,
helped offset a larger decline in union membership last year and may
continue to do so in the next few years. The Massachusetts Teachers
Association, the largest union in the state, continued its four-year
growth streak by gaining 3,349 members last year to a total of 107,510
members in June. "Our membership is still going up at this point," said
the union's president, Anne Wass.
And 22,000 of the state's home-care workers voted in November to join
the Service Employees International Union Local 1199, which now has
34,000 members. More sign-ups may soon stream in from Boston's major
teaching hospitals, where organizing efforts have been stirring for the
past year. "There's a major movement afoot with Boston hospital workers,
of which about 60,000 are nonunion right now, to join 1199 SEIU," said
Jeff Hall, spokesman for 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.
Julie Pinkham, executive director of the Massachusetts Nurses
Association, said efforts to unionize healthcare workers are probably
increasing because they hold longer-term payoffs.
"It's a more stable industry to focus your organizing efforts on,"
Pinkham said. "Whereas you see manufacturing jobs moving out of the
country, it's a lot harder to move healthcare jobs out of the country."
The Boston Globe
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Teach the children
By Steve Bailey, Globe Columnist
Memories are short. Fortunately, the court record is forever.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Commonwealth's largest
union, has decided to get into bed with Governor Slots and the
fabulously profitable gambling industry in backing three alleged
"destination resort" casinos. The state's teachers, of all people,
should know better. After all, they knew Richard Anzivino all too well.
If the teachers union gets its way, there will soon be many more
pathetic - and costly - losers just like him calling Massachusetts home.
Let me refresh your memory. Anzivino was a quiet, rumpled accountant who
lived with his elderly parents in Needham; he didn't own a car and took
public transportation to work. Then, 14 years after he started at the
teachers union, the telephone call finally came. On Sept. 13, 2002, the
union's bank called to alert officials of nine sequentially numbered
checks, each for $4,000, payable to Anzivino, the union's chief
financial officer, and deposited in his personal account. Two union
officials, Ed Sullivan and Ann Clarke, called Anzivino into a conference
room and confronted him. What is this about?
It was, in a word, about gambling. Anzivino admitted he had been
embezzling the union's money for years to pay for his high-roller trips
to the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos in Connecticut. He first told
them he had stolen maybe $200,000. Or was it $500,000? The final count:
270 checks totaling $802,000 in all. "OK," Anzivino subsequently told
investigators, "I originally thought it was $500,000. But I'm not
surprised it's $800,000."
Anzivino, through his lawyer, declined to comment. This from his
deposition:
Q. And did you embezzle any or all of the $802,000?
A. Yes.
Q. How much of it?
A. All of it.
Q. Where did the $802,000 go?
A. Gambling.
Anzivino spent a year in the Billerica House of Correction and is back
at the family home, still on probation. The teachers union spent an
estimated $300,000 on auditors and lawyers cleaning up the mess, but did
collect on Anzivino's gambling losses from two big insurance companies,
which insured them against theft. Hartford Casualty Insurance Co. won a
$534,000 judgment against Anzivino for its share of the losses. Good
luck to them trying to collect. That money went to the wonder-of-it-all
folks at Foxwoods, and they are not giving it back.
Now Governor Slots and the teachers want our own fun Foxwoods. Their
simple rationale: We need the dough. The Patrick administration puts the
current number of problem gamblers in Massachusetts as high as 310,000 -
or about the populations of Cambridge, Brookline, Newton, and Somerville
combined. A congressional gambling commission estimated that the number
of problem gamblers roughly doubles within a 50-mile radius of a casino.
And Governor Slots wants three.
Dick Anzivino is graphic testimony to how much damage a single gambling
addict can do. What is the real cost when you apply one of the
governor's famous economic multipliers?
Anne Wass, president of the teachers union, doesn't put a fine point on
it: "We need the revenues for our schools." She calls Anzivino a
personnel situation she would rather not discuss; he is inconvenient, no
question about it. "If somebody has an addiction problem, they are going
to find a way to do it," she told me.
Good teachers were some of the most important influences in my early
life. In high school Mr. Bomar tried mightily to teach me to play the
clarinet. Mrs. Door tried just as hard and nearly as unsuccessfully to
teach me algebra. Like the great Sam Cooke, I still don't know much
about algebra or a slide rule, for that matter, but I have hung on to
the timeless values they and other good teachers provided me. I don't
remember Mr. Bomar or Mrs. Door ever once telling me that the way to
success and happiness is by putting a dollar in a slot machine.
Teachers, of all people, should know better.
The Sudbury Town Crier
Friday, February 8, 2008
A look at the budget busters
By Kathy Uek
Town Manager Maureen Valente recently submitted a preliminary budget and
financial plan for fiscal 2009, but the Finance Committee has yet to
take a final vote
The budget follows the Finance Committee’s request for a balanced
budget, which is 1 percent below fiscal 2008 appropriations and a level
staff budget. This second budget scenario exceeds projected available
revenue by $2.6 million or overall 3.2 percent growth over fiscal ‘08
budget levels.
We looked at some of the main "budget busters" and asked Finance
Committee Vice Chairwoman Marty Ragones and Barbara Anderson,
director of Citizens for Limited Taxation to comment. In
reviewing the budget, generally the budget compares costs from fiscal
2004 to 2009.
Salaries and wages, the largest component of the operating budget for
all three cost centers, shows a greater than 5 percent average annual
increase during this period for the non-override budget and more than a
6 percent annual increase for the level staff budget. And from fiscal
2003 to 2009, in total health insurance increased 92 percent and
pensions, 95 percent.
"We have had significant increases in salaries and wages over the last
five-year period," said Ragones. "We are in the last year of a
three-year contract. In the new contract for fiscal 2010 to 2012 there
will be negotiations for both schools and town departments."
It’s hard to say no to local unions especially if they have amateurs
negotiators against professional union negotiators, added Anderson. "The
state is going to have to give some help to towns in these negotiations.
The towns got taken and now they are stuck and asking for overrides from
people also living with the economic downtown.
"My hope is they say no," Anderson added. "Somebody has to reform the
public employee benefit system before we all drown in unfunded
liabilities. Public sector employees are doing a lot better than the
private sector in salaries, pay raises and benefits."
Anderson compared the increase in salaries and benefits to automotive
industry workers in Detroit. "They talked themselves out of jobs because
of salaries and benefits," she said.
Finance Committee vice chairwoman preferred not to comment on collective
bargaining, but did state: "It is our hope the rate of increase of
operating expenses for the town and schools would not continue to rise
at this rate."
On the positive side, utility and gas/diesel expenses for this fiscal
year are more manageable, compared to double-digital increases over
previous years.
Comparing the town to 13 others in the area, Sudbury has the highest
rate of school age children. Sudbury has more students than Wellesley.
If 27 percent of the population in Wellesley were school age, the town
would have to pay about $30 million more to educate them, according to a
chart in the budget.
On the revenue side, Sudbury’s primary receipts come from property taxes
and state aid is decreasing. "It tends to put us in an override
situation," said Ragones. "Town expenses are growing roughly 4˝ to 7
percent annually and our revenue increases from taxes about 3 to 3.3
percent. There is a structural deficit - operating expenses increase
faster than revenue."
To help shrink the gap between expenditures and revenue in 2007, Sudbury
implemented a Cost Avoidance and Revenue Enhancement program. Also the
Budget Review Task Force is studying additional ways to cut expenses and
enhance revenue. In the last three years, Sudbury voted two overrides.
"In revenue they are getting 2˝ percent more than they got last year
plus new growth," said Anderson. "The state has a financial crisis so
towns can’t depend on much local aid plus the cost of huge unfunded
pensions and health liability. It’s all going to come crashing down
unless someone does something about it."
Sudbury intends to hold a budget forum on Monday, March 24, one week
before town election. Representatives from the cost centers, FINCOM and
Board of Selectmen will answer budget questions.
Boston Magazine
December 2007
Fate of the Unions
By Joe Keohane
[Excerpts]
With a string of recent organized-labor outrages, what was once a
fairy-tale notion in Massachusetts—hard-core union-busting—may become a
reality in today’s dire fiscal times. All we need is the right
demagogue.
Governor Patrick’s compulsive hope-mongering has always struck me as a
bunch of sweet-smelling nonsense, but earlier this year, I had a glimmer
of what he was getting at. It happened during the debate over whether to
allow municipal workers in Massachusetts cities and towns to join the
state’s Group Insurance Commission, or GIC. According to an independent
analysis, bringing these workers into the state pool—which offers more
flexibility and lower premiums and administrative costs—would save
cash-strapped cities and towns an estimated $100 million in healthcare
costs in 2009, and $2.5 billion annually by 2018. But there was a
potential roadblock: The municipal unions weren’t into it, because every
aspect of the plan wouldn’t be subject to collective bargaining. That
the unions were blockading some critical cost-cutting was
unsurprising—in Massachusetts, that’s what unions are for—but what was
different this time was that it looked as if, for once, they might not
get their way. At least that’s how it seemed when House Speaker Sal
DiMasi suggested we might leave it to the towns, and not labor leaders,
to decide....
Certainly, something must be done here. Formed to prevent the powerful
from preying upon the powerless, our public employee unions have
themselves become the powerful—their incessant wails for “fairness” are
minor masterpieces of Orwellian doublespeak—and it’s the rest of us who
are powerless against the flabbergastingly senseless status quo they
spend their days defending. With municipalities more reliant on rising
property taxes than they’ve been in 25 years, and unions squashing
anything that would help cut costs or increase efficiency, I started to
wonder whether we’re approaching a time when voter anger will outweigh
union clout, and politicians will be able to take a stand without being
carted off in pails afterward....
So I called Sam Tyler, the Boston Municipal Research Bureau’s president,
to run it past him. “You think that day has come?” Tyler said. And then
he laughed. And it wasn’t a sarcastic laugh, or a laugh for effect. He
was actually laughing. And while he kept laughing, I began to feel like
a college freshman who’s asked a hard-bitten soldier how many drum
circles he thinks it would take to stop all wars.
Yet mocking laughter, however rooted in reason, truth, and history, only
serves to strengthen the moonbat’s resolve. As municipalities resort to
a steady parade of Proposition 2˝ overrides just to keep the lights on,
and the state performs its grotesque courtship dance for casino
developers, the situation looks more and more like a tipping point or,
better yet, a tinderbox. It’s a juncture ripe for revolution. All that’s
needed now is a few real revolutionaries....
Politicians will only come forward if the public outrage
is sustained, and the public will only shed their union-outrage fatigue
if they can be reasonably confident that this time their ire will yield
results. Even though the unions have been their own worst enemy
recently, with the cluster of exquisite chicaneries aforementioned, that
alone won’t do the job. What’s needed is careful deployment of the tool
they have been using so deftly against us for years: old-fashioned
demagoguery....
The unions, who’ve long nurtured a victim complex to great
political avail, will of course cry foul, howling about how without them
we’d all be working 18 hours a day in some godforsaken cannery. But if
the ad is played right, the sentimental underdog appeal that is a key
part of their power will be eroded, and, with voter backing, real gains
might be made.
Admittedly, it’s a long shot, but I still say there’s hope. To pull one
from Nabokov (who, like union foes, was frequently accused by weasels of
harming children), it may be but a brief crack of light between two
eternities of darkness, but, hell, it’s something. Besides, in times of
crisis, we moonbats must dream.
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