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Republicans’ reaction to last week’s Monday Night Football debacle was record breaking given their decades of hating on union workers.

After replacement refs bestowed on the Seattle Seahawks a game clearly won by the Green Bay Packers, GOP standard bearers Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan and even Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the figurehead for GOP union-busting, called for the National Football League to restore its locked-out union refs.

Wait, what?

Unbelievably, it’s actually the sound of Republicans giving union refs a little respect. A union worker is to Republicans what comedian Rodney Dangerfield was to his stage wife – that is, a guy who can’t get no respect. Republicans have tried to tackle union rights since they were formally granted in 1935. The GOP admires business owners, not the working men and women whose labor is essential for companies to exist. The GOP believes owners and CEOs are indispensable but working stiffs are easily replaced. That’s what the NFL did – locked out the working stiffs and replaced them. That didn’t work out so well. And the GOP big wigs, in calling for the union refs’ reinstatement, admitted it. Amazing.

Here’s how it went down. First, the billion-dollar NFL locked out its union refs to save less than $5 million a year. That’s a lockout, not a strike. That means the refs were willing to work under the terms of their old contract until they could reach a new deal. But the NFL threw a little hissy fit and refused.

Lockouts don’t seem to make much sense. Logically, an employer would despise disruption and prefer workers continuing production until there’s agreement on a new contract. But that’s when workers are seeking a larger portion of the value of what they produce — higher pay or benefits.

When employers want to slash pay and benefits, they lock out workers. Even massively profitable employers – like the NFL – do it in an attempt to take more for themselves and give less to workers.

And the key ingredient here is disrespect. They hold workers in such contempt that they think anyone can be replaced. Easily. No problem. Here’s what Ray Anderson, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations, said in the early days of the lockout about the value of a ref:

“You’ve never paid for an NFL ticket to watch somebody officiate a game.”

That disrespect led directly to the Packers-Seahawks fiasco. From the outset, the replacement refs fumbled and bumbled. Coaches complained that games were out of control. Fans mocked the numerous bad calls. (more…)

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Last week’s ruling by Dane County Circuit Court Judge Juan Colas striking down the Wisconsin law (Act 10) that eliminated public employee collective bargaining rights, “Shows as we have said from day one,” says Wisconsin State AFL-CIO President Phil Neuenfeldt:

Scott Walker’s attempt to silence the union men and women of Wisconsin’s public sector was an immoral, unjust and illegal power grab. Now, a court has ruled that the essential provisions of Act 10, Scott Walker’s draconian attack on public worker’s right to collectively bargain, is unconstitutional.

Marty Bell, executive director of AFSCME Council 24 said that after the news was received, a crowd that had gathered for a solidarity rally in Madison for striking Chicago teachers cheered the news, “There was huge excitement there. Every public employee ought to be excited about this.”

We’ve now had a federal and state judge say this law was unconstitutional and that it violated not only the state constitution but the U.S. Constitution as well. The working men and women from across this state deserve to have their rights, which Scott Walker stole from them, restored and today’s ruling gave them hope. (more…)

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve highlighted American products, jobs and stories for our Made in America series, and we asked for your thoughts. Earlier in June, we rounded up what you told us are your favorite USA-made goods, here. This time around, there have been lots of great comments supporting Buy American, and a few questions.

Some of you asked about grills. We could not turn up any union-made grills but a quick search on the Web shows that several companies make grills in the United States, including Huntington Gas Grills from Indiana, Modern Home Products in Illinois, MAK Grills in Oregon and Memphis Wood Fire Grills from Minnesota.

Many, like Gene Roza, wrote to urge consumers to buy American-made goods. “Not only look for Made in U.S.A. products for the fourth but everyday of the year; and NEVER – NEVER – buy anything from Mal Wart….”

Edmundo Cavazos added:

You pay for cheap labor any where in the world, and you get cheap poor quality products. Products made in USA might cost slightly more or the same as products made in cheap labor nations. In the long run, USA made products will be of less cost, will last longer, and will not be replaced as often as products made in cheap labor countries. In USA we are proud of the quality we produce, and the savings we deliver. Keep jobs in USA!

Responding to Cavazos, jonespacks1 wrote:

Edmundo is correct. Tools are a great example, ask anyone who uses tools in the trade or frequently at home, and you’ll find they buy higher quality at higher price. Productivity of American workforce offsets the higher wages and buying “Made in America” keeps the cash in our country and keeps fellow Americans in jobs.

Some pointed out that some companies employing union workers donated to anti-worker politicians. As Robin Booth noted:

Miller Brewing is a big supporter of the Scott Walker regime here in Wisconsin. Please choose another beer when promoting American made products. (more…)

Last year, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker passed a law requiring citizens to show identification at the polls. While two state judges have blocked the law from going into effect, if the injunction is lifted the law would likely disenfranchise thousands of voters. The Center for American Progress visited the state during the contentious recall election to investigate.

It is disappointing that the recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was lost, but what makes it more disappointing is the fact that people actually voted against their own self-interest.

After all the damage Scott Walker has done to Wisconsonites while giving his rich cronies more of the state’s (the peoples’) wealth, they still went ahead and voted for him.

Everything they voted against (and for Walker) has to be publicized over and over again so they can realize just how foolish they were. Not only will the people who voted for him will see the error of their vote, but it will dampen the right-wing’s crowing about their “hollow” victory. 

Angel Rodriguez
Glendale, Ariz.

Elisabeth Wehling
Graduate Student, Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley

In taking over the framing of just about every major issue, conservatives have hidden major truths. Democrats need to speak those truths from their own moral perspective. To show how, we have just published The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide for Thinking and Talking Democratic. Here is how the book applies to the Wisconsin Recall:

The Wisconsin recall vote should be put in a larger context. What happened in Wisconsin started well before Scott Walker became governor and will continue as long as progressives let it continue. The general issues transcend unions, teachers, pensions, deficits, and even wealthy conservatives and Citizens United.

Where progressives argued policy — the right to collective bargaining and the importance of public education — conservatives argued morality from their perspective, and many working people who shared their moral views voted with them and against their own interests. Why? Because morality is central to identity, and hence trumps policy.

Progressive morality fits a nurturant family: parents are equal, the values are empathy, responsibility for oneself and others, and cooperation. That is taught to children. Parents protect and empower their children, and listen to them. Authority comes through an ethic of excellence and living by what you say, rather than by enforcing rules.

Correspondingly in politics, democracy begins with citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly both for oneself and others. The mechanism by which this is achieved is The Public, through which the government provides resources that make private life and private enterprise possible: roads, bridges and sewers, public education, a justice system, clean water and air, pure food, systems for information, energy and transportation, and protection both for and from the corporate world. No one makes it on his or her own. Private life and private enterprise are not possible without The Public. Freedom does not exist without The Public. (more…)

By Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large, The American Prospect

While hardly surprising to anyone who read the polls, yesterday’s victory by Republican Governor Scott Walker was a body blow to Wisconsin unions and to American workers. Within Wisconsin, Walker’s victory ensures that his law repealing collective-bargaining rights for public employees will stay on the books, and if Republicans maintain their hold on the state senate—four of their senators faced recall elections, and as I write this at least three have survived—they will, at least in theory, be able to go forward on other parts of their Social Darwinist agenda. Whether they will—and whether they opt to go after private-sector unions, too, with right-to-work legislation—remains unclear. Such a move on Walker’s part, coming on the heels of the most divisive 18 months in the state’s history, would only escalate what is already a political civil war. Even Walker may think it the better part of valor to pass on that for now.

But the damage already done by Walker’s anti-union legislation, which eliminated public employee unions’ ability to automatically collect dues from its members’ paychecks, is vast. A May 30 article in the Wall Street Journal reported that membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a union founded in Wisconsin in 1936, had declined in state from 62,818 in March 2011 to 28,745 in February of this year. Membership in the American Federation of Teachers had declined in-state from 17,000 to 11,000, the article reported. The membership numbers for Wisconsin’s largest public-sector union, the National Education Association, are not available.

Added to the prohibition on their ability to bargain over wages and conditions of work, what the dramatic drop in union membership means is that workers’ power to win a decent life either at the workplace or at the ballot box will be weakened. Union treasuries will grow smaller, as will the level of resources they can devote to election campaigns. That means not just less money to campaign for union-specific issues, but for the whole panoply of causes (and the candidates who back them) that unions routinely support—women’s and minority rights, affordable higher education, financial regulation, the works.

The larger question coming out of Wisconsin is whether the result will embolden other Republican governors to go down this path. Some, of course, have already tried and been soundly rebuffed, most particularly Ohio’s John Kasich, whose own law repealing his state’s public employee bargaining rights was overturned by referendum last November by a 61-percent-to-39-percent margin. I’ve attempted on this blog to analyze why the outcomes were so different, especially since Wisconsin is by every measure a more liberal state than Ohio. I’ve noted that Ohio union activists had the ability to wage a timely referendum campaign, while Wisconsin law has no provision for referendums, and the recall—a more complicated question—had to wait more than a year before being put before state voters. (more…)

By Jim Hightower
Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist

Unless you hang out in posh watering holes with America’s far-right billionaires, chances are that you don’t know Diane Hendricks. But Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s anti-middle-class, union-whacking governor, knows her and loves her… a lot.

In fact, Scott loves Diane at least half-a-million dollars worth. That’s how much the heiress to ABC Supply (the nation’s largest roofing and siding wholesaler) has put down so far on Walker’s desperate effort to avoid being only the third governor in U.S. history to lose a recall election. His day of reckoning is tomorrow, and his last bastion of support is a phalanx of union-hating, out-of-state billionaires like Hendricks and the infamous Koch brothers, who’ve erected a multimillion-dollar wall of money around him. “We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin,” deadpanned David Koch of New York City. “We’ve gotten pretty good at this over the years,” he boasted of his extremist political attack machine, adding that, “We’re going to spend more.”

As of last week, Scott had amassed $30 million from friends like David – a sum comparable to what Mitt Romney’s campaign raised to win the GOP presidential nomination! Such Koch cronies as the DeVos family, founders of the Amway marketing empire, chipped in a quarter-million for the right-wing’s nationwide “Save Scott” campaign, and Foster Friess, the evangelical millionaire who dumped a ton of cash on Rick Santorum’s theocratic run for the presidency this year, is in for $100,000.

There’s an old rule in big business: If you don’t have any sense behind you, pour in dollars. From the Edsel to “new Coke” – and now to Scott Walker – the strategy has been to overcome all product defaults with PR cash. Tomorrow, we’ll see what Koch cash can buy. And if it buys the governorship of Wisconsin – look out where you live.

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National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks. Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top. He publishes a populist political newsletter, “The Hightower Lowdown.” He is a New York Times best-selling author, and has written seven books including, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There’s Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

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This has been reposted from Reader Supported News.

By Doug Foote
Social Media Specialist at Working America

On June 5th, voters in Wisconsin will go to the polls in an historic recall election, where they will decide who will serve as Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and State Senator in several districts for the rest of the current term. Nearly all the elected officials targeted by recall, who are in danger of being removed from office on the June 5th ballot, have something else in common: past or present affiliation with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.

At the center of the firestorm is Governor Scott Walker, who earned the ire of Wisconsin voters for his relentless drive to restrict collective bargaining rights for 350,000 state workers, as well as his negligence toward Wisconsin’s job crisis. But before he became a household name, Walker served in the State Assembly from 1993-2002, where he was an ALEC member from 1995-1998.

During that time, Walker worked with fellow ALEC politician Governor Tommy Thompson to pass a model “Truth in Sentencing Bill,” which was developed by ALEC’s now-shuttered Public Safety and Elections Task Force. The bill required all criminal defendants to serve “no less than 85 percent” of the sentence imposed. For those convicted of violent crime, the bill called for them to serve 100 percent of the sentence imposed by the court; no parole, and no chance for early release.

This bill was developed specifically to benefit an ALEC member corporation, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which for many years housed overflow Wisconsin inmates in other states. CCA was on ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force at the time. (more…)

By Doug Foote
Social Media Specialist at Working America

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her allies in the state legislature are seeking to use millions of dollars intended for struggling homeowners to pay for prison construction and tax cuts instead, echoing a policy put in place earlier this year in Wisconsin by Governor Scott Walker.

Remember the $26 billion foreclosure settlement, the one agreed upon by the five biggest banks and 49 state Attorneys General? As one of the hardest his states, Arizona is getting $1.6 billion, as well as an additional $97.7 million to be overseen by the office of Attorney General Tom Horne, to be used for “housing counselors, legal aid, hotlines, and to help stressed homeowners with their payments.”

Two main things to understand about these funds: they are wildly insufficient given the scale of the problem, but all the same they are extremely crucial. In March, Arizona had the highest foreclosure rate in the country, according to RealtyTrac, with 9,497 foreclosures. If any state needs all the help it can get when it comes to homeowner education, assistance, and relief, it’s Arizona.

Even so, Governor Brewer and Republican state legislators want to siphon $50 million from those funds to “relieve pressure on the budget.” So in other words, use money intended to help homeowners for…other things.

Lawmakers say the money amounts to a pricey outreach and education fund. It won’t hurt to take half of it, House Speaker Andy Tobin said.

“We’re using the funds to relieve the pressure on the budget,” said Tobin, R-Paulden. Those stresses range from a push to replace welfare dollars lost to federal budget cuts to prison construction, he said.

How is this justified? You can thank a loophole in the settlement language, which says the funds can be used “to compensate the state for costs resulting from the alleged unlawful conduct of the defendants.” Arizona lawmakers like House Speaker Tobin are claiming that since foreclosure fraud hurt homeowners, which in turn hurt tax revenues and by extension the state budget, they can use the money for whatever they damn well please. (more…)