Right Wing Using Bailout Crisis To Push Anti-Union Attitudes -- Their 2008 Hot-Button Issue?

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Christine Bowman

Looks like the GOP right wing has found its hot-button issue for 2008. Not gays in the military or perpetual "life support" for Terri Schiavo (may she rest in peace). It's back to union busting. Unions have always been a favored scapegoat of the right.

Conservatives are trying to exploit economic hard times to blame and destroy organized working people. They cry "no more bailouts" the minute a bailout might help unionized workers in a troubled industry. They must have somehow missed Obama's message of national unity and careful, pragmatic problem solving.

Multi-millionaire Mitt Romney was talking tough on CNN Wednesday morning, and in his New York Times Op-Ed entitled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,"* but many others have chimed in, too. A regular chorus of indignation is aimed at middle class assembly line workers and retirees. A letter posted at US News expresses the blame-the-unions anger of, presumably, "a regular guy":

I think the Detroit Three need to go. They have ignored their customers' needs for decades. Their market share dwindled, and all they did to counter that was to build more profit-making vehicles for the stalwart Detroit buyers that care nothing about quality, value, or economy. The United Auto Workers Union is a greedy entity that needs to be dissolved. I hope the government will not make us pay for Detroit's mistakes.

So the worker on the assembly plant line is responsible for all that went wrong? Not likely. But the letter writer singles out the UAW. The pronoun "They" is not a stand-in for CEOs, corporate board members, K Street lobbyists, corrupted legislators, or "greedy" stockholders -- is it? No, the conclusion is that "The UAW ... needs to be dissolved." And don't overlook the "us vs. them" framing!

It's hard to imagine how letting the American auto industry crash and burn would make things better. Romney, who campaigned in Michigan only a few months back on the promise to preserve jobs, told CNN that "in the long term" auto industry bankruptcies would make for a healthier economy. He did seem a little uncomfortable when reminded of his campaign promises (at 2 minutes, 40 seconds into the CNN video). But job losses, declining wages, and lost pensions at the Big Three and in all the smaller companies that would fall like dominoes behind the Big Three, no longer worry him. It's all about trusting the free market and "shedding excess labor," is that it, Mitt?

This is typical right-wing scapegoating of the union movement and ideology-driven, not practical, problem solving. It is conservatives' standard operating procedure to oversimplify complex problems and then point the finger at a convenient target -- unions? liberals? gays? elites?

If the right-wing anti-worker, anti-middle-class argument prevails this time, in the ensuing economic disaster (Barack Obama's word choice) we will all pay the price. We're in this economy together, America. Don't let the right wing decide whom to throw first out of the lifeboat.

*Romney advocates give-backs by UAW workers so they match workers at foreign-owned plants. Why not equalize the playing field by mandating better pension or wage parity at those non-union plants?

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS