Remember the Big Labor resurgence? Neither do we, but we ventured back 29 days into our archives, and there was the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne declaring on NPR that Gov. Scott Walker's success in passing legislation curtailing the power of unions was a victory for those labor monopolies: "What [Walker and the GOP] have done is they have mobilized Democrats and the labor movement--Democrats in a way President Obama wasn't able to in 2010, and the labor movement, as it's never been mobilized before."
"Voters have sided with . . . the unions," Dionne had written five days earlier. Last week this assertion was put to a test at the ballot box, and it proved true. Voters did side with the unions. Not a majority of voters, mind you, but a big enough minority to almost oust a sitting justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in favor of Big Labor's candidate. OK, they lost, but it isn't as if voting out a sitting Supreme Court justice is easy in Wisconsin. Had it happened, it would have been for the first time in almost 1,100 days...
So far from being mobilized "as it's never been mobilized before," Big Labor is "deeply troubled"--and also, according to Politico, "raw," "bitter" and "disappointed." Why?
Perhaps their political power is fading because increasingly their adversaries are not Big Business but taxpayers. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, a majority of labor union members work for the government... Supporters of labor monopolies have attempted to elide the distinction between government and private-sector employees, in the hope of inspiring the latter's "solidarity" with the former. But the decades-long decline of private-sector unions means that only a tiny minority of nongovernment workers are part of Big Labor. The labor monopolies may feel they "must still try to maintain a relationship with the Democratic Party," but the Democratic Party also has to maintain a relationship with those of us who pay the bills.
