Published 11 Jul, 2011
A question for GOP governors: How’s that “bash-the-workers” thing working out for you?
Not so well, according to public opinion polls. Republican governors leading the charge to cut health care, gut pensions, and cancel bargaining rights for public employees have seen their approval ratings tank.
Rick Scott, who cut $8 billion from Florida’s education budget and is attacking workplace rights for classroom teachers, has a rock-bottom 29 percent approval rating.
Ohio’s John Kasich, prime mover of a law banning the right to strike and preventing workers from bargaining on health care, now has a 33 percent approval rating. He’s tied with Michigan’s Rick Snyder, who pushed a bill allowing “emergency managers” to rip up contracts – including labor agreements — in any city or school district experiencing “financial stress.”
The mother of all union-bashers, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, isn’t doing much better. Months after a controversial anti-worker bill led to weeks of protests in the state capitol and a series of court challenges, Walker has a 43 percent approval rating. Surveys show that if an election were held today, he’d lose by a ten-point margin. Some honeymoon period –huh?
What went wrong for the Republicans? For one thing, they had power to enact their programs. Scott, Kasich, Snyder and Walker lead states where the GOP controls the governorship and both branches of the state legislature. They’ve slashed state budgets, delivered fat tax cuts to corporations, and handcuffed the ability of workers to bargain for wages and benefits.
CNN political analyst William Schneider looked at eight battleground states where Republicans control all three branches of government. Approval ratings for GOP governors have dropped sharply in seven of them. (The eighth, Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, isn’t necessarily doing better; it’s just that no polling data is available.)
Some Democrats, by the way, have also joined the bandwagon, backing anti-worker legislation in New Jersey, Massachusetts and elsewhere. Whichever party they are from, politicians have a tough sell convincing voters that transit workers, teachers or firefighters are to blame for the financial problems facing state and local governments.
We’ll soon know more about just how frustrated voters are. Recall elections are scheduled this month and next in Wisconsin; early surveys suggest that support for Walker’s attack on public workers could cost Republicans control of the State Senate.
In Ohio, a grass-roots coalition is petitioning to repeal Kasich’s controversial anti-worker legislation. Organizers collected nearly 1.3 million signatures, almost six times the number needed to put repeal on the ballot. TWU members who circulated petitions in Akron, Cleveland and Columbus said they could barely keep up with the flood of signatures from friends, neighbors and co-workers. Winning Connections, a telemarketing firm with a long track record of political advocacy, reports a more enthusiastic response for the repeal effort – and higher rates of volunteer sign-up – than for any campaign they’ve ever worked on.
Bashing workers is unfair. It’s bad for business, because it takes money away from consumers who drive the U.S. economy, and it’s bad politics. Attacking the middle class is always a losing strategy. As the gap in incomes widen between working families and the very rich, the enthusiasm gap also will widen for the hare-brained idea of punishing the middle class while further enriching the wealthy during an economic downturn.