• by Kanya D'Almeida (new york)
• Wednesday, February 23, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Taking their place among a newly vocal chorus of protesters around the world, over 68,000 workers in the northeastern U.S. state of Wisconsin came out Tuesday to oppose a bill, sponsored by Republican Governor Scott Walker, designed to strip the labour force of its collective bargaining rights.

Since last week, thousands upon thousands of workers have occupied the State Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, flooding the streets around the building and rallying in the square outside to protest the proposed bill.

Critics say the legislation, while ostensibly aimed at closing a budget gap of 137 million dollars, in reality exposes a trend of anti-unionism and, despite the presence of a democratic president, a return to extreme right-wing conservatism in U.S. domestic politics.

At a time when the ripple effects of democratic uprisings are more potent than ever, New York City, the labour union capital of North America, wasted no time in putting together a protest in solidarity with the workers in Madison.

Organised by a coalition of local unions, The Nation Magazine and the Job Party (a progressive alternative to the Tea Party's ultra-conservative agenda), a last-minute call for a rally outside the headquarters of Fox News Tuesday drew a crowd at least 1,500-strong, complete with signs, banners and a determination, despite the frigid weather, to have their voices heard.

'We are standing up for the workers of Wisconsin in their fight against Scott Walker, a Tea Party governor, who's got the support of Fox News,' Bob Fertik, a spokesperson for the Job Party, told IPS.

'We're here today because here in New York we have similar issues with the mayor and the governor as well,' he added.

'We support the teachers, the firefighters, the policemen, all the workers in Madison because they have collective bargaining rights — the governor wants to take away those rights, but they won't accept it and we can't accept it,' Fertik said.

'We see this as an attack on workers throughout the country,' one protester speaking under condition of anonymity told IPS.

'There is a nationwide attack, specifically on municipal workers and their unions, to eliminate whatever power the working class has and to force upon them the financial burdens that have resulted from the shameless four-trillion- dollar bailout and theft of working peoples' wealth.'

'The very people who created the conditions for this economic crisis are the people who are leading the current attack on the organized workforce so that they can continue to extract from the workers the money that's needed to repair the country,' the protester added.

'Conditions have deteriorated in New York as [Governor] Andrew Cuomo rides into office on a programme of cutting education and health care, freezing wages and hiring of municipal labourers, and slashing taxes on the rich,' he told IPS. 'This could well lead to an organised attack on labour in New York as well — we've seen it before and we'll see it again.'

The tone of the crowd grew increasingly militant as scores more people joined the demonstration, and chants of 'Egypt to Wisconsin — class revolution' and 'What's disgusting? Union busting!' echoed across Sixth Avenue.

Why Labour? Why Now?

According to a Fiscal Bureau Memorandum issued last month, Wisconsin had a 121.4-million-dollar surplus through the remainder of the current fiscal year. Even with Walker's claims that the fiscal house is in disarray due to a recent tax tiff with Minnesota, and his projection that a budget shortfall could occur well before the end of the fiscal year, Wisconsin has not reached the 'statutory trigger' — about 188 million dollars — that would necessitate a repair bill.

So why then, economists and analysts are asking, is Walker dead set on this bill, despite the growing call for a general strike initiated this week by the South Central Federation of Labour, an umbrella organisation representing more than 45,000 workers in Wisconsin?

'What we cannot figure out is this: Why, if the state is in so much trouble, did Walker engineer the enactment of roughly 140 million dollars in new tax breaks for multinational corporations, which the legislature passed in January?' asks political blogger John Nichols.

'Why did he rush to reject federal transportation funding that other states rushed to collect? Why, in the very week that he was pushing his budget repair bill, did the governor reject federal broadband development money that Wisconsin's rural counties have been seeking for years?'

'The answer to all of these questions,' Nichols writes, 'is that the governor has made his budget decisions not with an eye toward fiscal responsibility but with an eye toward rewarding his political benefactors.'

'Out-of-state corporations, road-building interests that did not want competition from high-speed rail, telecommunications corporations that want to cash in on the demand for broadband all benefitted from the decisions made by the governor in January,' he concluded.

These analyses, according to political and financial analyst Andy Kroll, fall neatly into the mould that Walker has created for himself since coming to office on a political path that has been bankrolled by Charles and David Koch, 'the very rich, very conservative, and very anti-union oil- and-gas magnates.'

'Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Reason Foundation have long taken a very antagonistic view toward public-sector unions. They've used their vast fortunes to fight key Obama initiatives on health care and the environment, while writing fat checks to Republican candidates across the country,' Kroll added.

Seen through this broader lens of Walker's political allegiances, the events in Wisconsin take on a different light.

As political columnist Sally Kohn points out, the crisis in Wisconsin 'isn't about budget deficits or government spending or even public employee benefits. It's class war, wherein the big business, conservative Right tries to pit working class Americans against one another so that the super-rich can continue to pilfer our private and public coffers for their own boundless gain.'

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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