There’s been a lot of talk lately about income/wealth inequality. It’s going to be the focus of this year’s Massachusetts Democratic State Convention.
(Trust me, I’ll get to Tom Brady eventually)
I’m betting there will be a lot of talk about updating “skill sets”, job training, investments in education and the workforce of the 21st Century.
The danger in presenting this as the solution to the problem lies in the assumption that a lack of updating “skill sets”, job , training, investments in education is what caused the wealth gap that is now as wide as it was in the gilded age of the 1920’s.
If this was the case, rising inequality in America over the past forty years would be a story of the 29% of Americans with college degrees pulling away from the rest. However, as we examine the data, we learn that the growth in inequality has been highest between the top 1% and the top 20%, and indeed between the top 0.1% or even 0.01% and everyone else.
I have said this before and I will say it once more, we cannot educate ourselves out of this mess. In short, we need to organize. That is not to say that education is not important for laborers but it is no more important than a level playing field with employers.
Fifty years ago, nearly a third of U.S. workers belonged to a union. Today, it’s one in ten. Let’s start there.
It’s not going to be easy to convince voters the value of labor unions. Unions are routinely denigrated by the media, by Republicans, and even union members. We all see through the push for Charter Schools as a way to weaken and eventually eliminate the teachers unions. Too many voters are convinced that it’s the unions that are hurting our schools, despite the reality that virtually all the nations that surpass our school scores in math, science, and language skills are all staffed by teachers unions. Finally, who can forget when the majority of union households in Massachusetts voted for Republican Scott Brown in 2010? It’s not going to be easy but without unions, the road to an equitable distribution of wealth seems impossible.
Scott Walker was elected governor and is now seeking the presidency on his record of attacking unions. He is polling well in the field of Republicans Gov. Scott Walker, in case you missed it, signed legislation that commits hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to a new arena for the NBA . It has been pointed out that Walker rides a union made Harley Davidson. It should also be noted that the basketball players who will be benefitting from this new taxpayer funded stadium are members of a labor union. It takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance for Walker to attack teachers unions and embrace players unions.
This brings me to Tom Brady. See? I told you I’d get to him.
I’ve only lived in Massachusetts for about fifteen years but if there is one thing I know it’s that we love our sports teams and especially our star players. The coverage of “Deflate-Gate” has eclipsed major world events. Tom Brady and the Patriots are important to us and it’s time we acknowledged and embraced the reality that they are union workers.
Tom is now in the midst of a major labor dispute with his employer, the National Football League. His net worth is in the hundreds of millions and could surely afford any attorney he chose. However, his labor rights are being fought for by the lawyers hired by his labor union. Tom’s union bothers are behind him in the fight against unfair labor practices by his employer. If a labor union and all the benefits that come with it is good enough for Tom Brady, shouldn’t it be good enough for you?
Maybe we can get Tom or another union member of the Patriots to be a guest speaker at the convention and tell us all why they support labor unions and we should too.
…I think I once heard or read that Tom Brady is a Republican.
In 2011, the Players Association and some individual Green Bay Packers came out in support of Wisconsin state workers’ right to organize. Here’s the Players Association statement:
More here.
Somebody – ask Tom for his views on the Pacheco law.
I don’t think people are anti-union per se; they.are anti- PUBLIC EMPLOYEE unions.
You and your ideological kin have done a superb job destroying almost all private unions. Once the public unions are killed off thanks to your pet judges, there will be nothing left between the owners of the Republican Party and more money.
I think your suggestion is something that you’d very much like to be true, but isn’t outside the small minority of citizens that make up a rabid plurality of Republican primary voters.
Certainly, the public may take issue here and there with some public employee issue or another, the kind that are made for the headlines and exploited by Koch Bros & Co., but there’s no fervent ALL CAPS hatred of public employee unions in the greater public that I’ve ever seen.
Even with all the millions poured into PR campaigns by rightwing groups to try to turn the public against public teachers, people still like teachers. They like their town hall employees who often know them by name, even though they only go into town hall once or twice a year. They like their mail carrier who delivers the mail every day, and the firemen who are the first responders in their community, and most people even love their local police force, who provide any number of services.
I really don’t see any huge evidence that the public hates, dislikes or even thinks all that much about public employee unions — but by and large, they tend to be very fond of the public employees who provide vital services to them everyday.
This is why Republicans try to throw every public employee together, to turn them into some impersonal, amorphous group… when in reality public employees are their friends and neighbors, and no one wants to see their friends and neighbors lose pay or benefits or even their pension that they’ve paid into for decades.
Whenever people attack them, I remind them that on 9/11, as private citizens fled from the burning towers, public union employees ran into the buildings to help others. That was their job and they did it without question.
I think there may be something to it. Ask anyone who has been to the Dept Motor Vehicles about their experience. It has gotten better but often the average person’s interaction was spending a half hour in line to be told at the window that it wasn’t stamped properly.
That scene has been used in Saturday Night Live skits and even recent car insurance commercials so it’s not my imagination.
I’ve never had an unpleasant experience at the RMV, yet again, the canard persists. On the other hand, “customer service” is a thing of the past with cable/phone companies, most banks, insurance companies and the like.
….once I get to the window. There is still a lot of waiting, usually longer than the estimated time on your ticket. If someone knows the nuances of which services get which letters and how they decide what order to call people in I’d love to hear it.
…because that’s all that’s left. Again, union membership has been decimated by trade and labor policy. In the fifties and sixties, 90 percent of all coal miners belonged to UMWA. Today, the union estimates that its membership hovers around 25 percent. And so on with all other private unions.
Part of me suspects that could factor into why Roger Goodell seems to have so much animosity toward Brady.
Don’t forget — when the players union temporarily disbanded when the last contract negotiations stalled, so the players could file an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, Brady allowed himself to be the figurehead of that lawsuit, making it Tom Brady v the NFL.
The players basically won that fight, forced the NFL back into negotiations, reformed the union and got a better deal than they otherwise would have.
Of course, this fight with the NFL must be quickly cementing in Tom’s head the need and importance of a strong union in the NFL.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d be able to make the connection to regular people. He’s a brighter guy than most give him credit for. The question is if he’d be willing to get involved in a bigger way, after “Deflategate” is all sorted out.
The NFL Players Association is a part of the AFL-CIO. It would be great to see if the AFL could get the NFLPA to get a few players (and/or retired players) together and make a commercial and web campaign about the difference a union’s made in their careers, and how nearly everyone would benefit from having a union.
Maybe they could tailor it regionally — Tom Brady would sell well in New England, but maybe not so much in other parts of the country…. but other teams have other players who would, and there’s certainly no shortage of retired NFL fan favorites who would be great in this capacity.
I find it easy to imagine arch-rivals on the field appearing — in uniform — in a video spot where they join in a team huddle. The quarterback speaks a few well-written lines, the players clap their hands once and jump up, and the screen dissolves into a “Unions benefit everybody” page.