September 07, 2024 6:00 am
• Last Updated: September 06, 2024 9:09 am
Over the Labor Day weekend leading Democrats — starting with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz — claimed loudly that theirs is the party of organized labor and working people.
Insofar as organized labor — unions — consists these days mostly of government employees, the Democrats were telling the truth. Unionized government employees are the party’s army and are well rewarded financially for working to keep Democratic regimes in power. During the holiday weekend Connecticut Inside Investigator reported that government employees in the state are the country’s most unionized government employees.
This is largely because Connecticut law virtually requires state and municipal employees to be unionized and, through binding arbitration of their contracts, gives them great control over their compensation and working conditions. Connecticut’s system of labor relations is a surreptitious program of public financing of Democratic political campaigns, a system far more effective than the state’s formal program of campaign finance, the Citizens’ Election Program, for which all candidates are eligible.
Unionized government employees are a privileged class. The working class is something else, a matter of the private sector, and private-sector workers are not doing so well under Democratic regimes. Indeed, as the holiday weekend began, employees of major hotel companies throughout the country launched a strike for higher pay in the belief that, as their picket-line signs said, “One job should be enough.”
But the days when one job could support a family are long gone from the United States. They are gone in part because much of the world has industrialized and made labor more productive. But they are also long gone from the United States because the country has sunk under the political and moral corruption of inflationary finance of government and has repealed standards in public education. Inflation has nullified wage gains while the U.S. workforce is losing its advantage in skills over the workforces of other countries. Because of social promotion many if not most U.S. high school graduates today are qualified only for menial work.
Real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — have been falling for the U.S. working class to enable elected officials to claim credit for distributing goodies financed by mere money creation and borrowing and to wage imperial wars without the political limits that war taxes would impose. Meanwhile inflation has transferred huge wealth away from labor to capital, the owners of property, as with the spectacular increase in housing prices.
Despite national Democratic campaign propaganda that the country has never had it so good economically, many Democratic elected officials at the state level sense that real life is quite different. Hence the clamor, especially strong in supposedly wealthy Connecticut, for more government subsidies for the basics of life — food, housing, fuel, electricity, medical care, child care and such.
Often today even two jobs aren’t enough.
Inflation and inadequate work skills are why so many people can’t support themselves anymore, along with welfare policies that encourage harmful behavior and embed people in poverty.
Inflation, the collapse of public education and welfare dependence are not acts of God but government policies. So who is responsible for them?
Both major political parties are, though the Democratic Party’s adherence to them is more ironic, given the party’s claim to represent the working class. On the national level inflationary government finance is equally a Republican policy, and while it has been a long time since Connecticut had a Republican administration, Republican state legislators and municipal officials go along with some destructive Democratic policies, like continually increasing teacher compensation even as student proficiency keeps falling.
The only compelling reason now for raising the compensation of Connecticut’s teachers is just to keep them coming to work amid the worsening epidemic of student misbehavior and mental illness, about which no one will do anything.
Those students misbehaving themselves out of an education are the working class of the future, and they will be even less able than the current working class to understand how they have been cheated and abused.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. He can be reached at [email protected].
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Publish date : 2024-09-06 23:06:00
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