Skip to main content

Love's Labor Lost?

Support Provided By
unions-wisconsin-ohio

From my comfortable perch in (relatively) union-friendly L.A., it's more than amazing to watch public employees in Wisconsin and now Ohio battle to retain the right to collectively bargain. In the last twenty years we've all gotten used to unions giving back things, even on this coast, in the form of wage freezes, layoffs and the like; we've gotten used to traditional union benefits being singled out for takedowns every time a state budget crisis looms, and the crises have been looming all over the country for years now. But the confrontation now is alarmingly different. Public employees are being asked not to cut their benefits or trim their pensions, but to give up the right to be in a union at all. This is not an ask on the part of legislators and governors, it's a declaration of war, and the response of mass protests by public employees in Wisconsin and Ohio's capitols are perfectly appropriate to me--these teachers, home care workers and others are in a battle for their very lives. They're also battling to stay afloat as members of the middle class, which has been steadily drained by economic policies and practices entirely unfriendly to unions and the pro-worker agenda they historically carry. How all these bare middle-classers got set up as American fat cats while Wall Street tycoons and financiers have walked away unscathed, even enriched, after pulling the rug out from under so many of us, is one of the more remarkable feats of the coporatocracy that continues to paint itself as democracy's best hope. More remarkable than that is the fact that people continue to buy it.

Make no mistake, the full frontal attack on collective bargaining is also an attack on people of color. Unions, especially in the public sector, are what eventually gave black people a stable foundation on which to build an economic identity and a sense that work could not be taken away capriciously. After generations of having no safe place in a labor scene that saw blacks as wholly expendable, if not downright undesireable, unions provided that place. They grew the black middle class almost overnight, from the '60s onward, and in no big city was that middle class more prosperous-looking than in L.A., the land of new fortune and reinvented stature.

My father, a former probation officer and consultant for the county Human Relations Commission, was a public employee for 37 years. My mother worked for L.A. Unified. My husband has been teacher for the district for nearly 30 years. None are wealthy, or are going to be, but the stability their work has afforded me and still affords me now is gold. If the anti-union hysteria being manufactured by Republican cynics comes west, I'm putting on my battle gear and getting in the streets. It's the least I can do for those whose labor made me believe in the idea of a democracy at all.

Journalist and op-ed columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan's first-person accounts of politics and identity in Los Angeles, with an eye towards the city's African American community, appear every Thursday at 2 p.m. on KCET's SoCal Focus blog.

Support Provided By
Read More
Gray industrial towers and stacks rise up from behind the pitched roofs of warehouse buildings against a gray-blue sky, with a row of yellow-gold barrels with black lids lined up in the foreground to the right of a portable toilet.

California Isn't on Track To Meet Its Climate Change Mandates. It's Not Even Close.

According to the annual California Green Innovation Index released by Next 10 last week, California is off track from meeting its climate goals for the year 2030, as well as reaching carbon neutrality by 2045.
A row of cows stands in individual cages along a line of light-colored enclosures, placed along a dirt path under a blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds.

A Battle Is Underway Over California’s Lucrative Dairy Biogas Market

California is considering changes to a program that has incentivized dairy biogas, to transform methane emissions into a source of natural gas. Neighbors are pushing for an end to the subsidies because of its impact on air quality and possible water pollution.
A Black woman with long, black brains wears a black Chicago Bulls windbreaker jacket with red and white stripes as she stands at the top of a short staircase in a housing complex and rests her left hand on the metal railing. She smiles slightly while looking directly at the camera.

Los Angeles County Is Testing AI's Ability To Prevent Homelessness

In order to prevent people from becoming homeless before it happens, Los Angeles County officials are using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict who in the county is most likely to lose their housing. They would then step in to help those people with their rent, utility bills, car payments and more so they don't become unhoused.