Thoughts on Ohio and the hope of one day being able to collectively bargain

The union stripping bill, SB5. was defeated Tuesday in Ohio. The union rightly claimed that it was a large victory for its membership and their families but this assessment misses a key element to the story. It was also a big victory for all working Americans: who refused to give up on the idea of unions and collective bargaining. Most people realize that they have been negotiating on their own for the last thirty years and it hasn't gone real well. Unions were formed on the principle that through collective bargaining and the fact that collectively people are able to negotiate from a stronger position. By attacking this right, the people who have put through these anti-union decrees have declared that it is better for working people to have to beg individually than it is that they get to negotiate collectively.


The reason for the backlash in this country, in the way of the occupy movement has caught the imagination, is that most working people like the idea of unions when it comes to working for them. Many working people don't have the right to collective bargaining but that doesn't mean they wouldn't like to have it in the future. They'd rather keep this dream alive in some form; than to see it squashed because their neighbor has a better deal and have to build one hundred years of labor history back up from ground zero. In this the powers that are actually running this country, not the politicians who work for them, have miscalculated. They thought that the Americans would jealously prefer to have a couple of tax dollars back in the present as their wages continue to sink like a stone with no chance of hoping for anything better.


If anything this is a time to expand the labor movement as most Americans seem to feel that labor has a role in American life and that it's involvement is better for the working class. The anti-labor forces is on the defensive and they are afraid of the seeds they've sewn because they have no idea how to handle it. They keep looking for ways for their media mouthpieces to subvert the Occupy Movement so Americans can go back to fighting with one another again, against their own interests; as the politicians that are in their pocket search for laws and ordinances to shut down descent. Their problem is they need working to middle class people to enforce it and they have often made clear, as they did in Ohio SB5, that once they've done this these "idiots" as Governor Kaschich called them will be next.