Bargaining rights are human rights

This seemed like a good message to start off the new year.  Let's make 2012 the year workers fight back against the attack on unions.   We won't give up our unions and the right to a voice at work through collective bargaining.  Happy New Year!

 
JOHN NICHOLS | Wisconsin Cap Times associate editor | jnichols@madison.com |Posted: Sunday, December 18, 2011

Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch is leading the attack on collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin — claiming in a new video ad that collective bargaining by unions represents some sort of threat to taxpayers or communities or — though this remains unspoken — the out-of-state special interests that are trying to keep her in office.
What Kleefisch does not recognize, however, is that collective bargaining is not some evil that must be wiped out. In fact, the right of workers to organize and to have a voice in the workplace and in our politics is universally recognized as a fundamental underpinning of a free society.
Claiming that collective bargaining rights must be swept away in order to balance budgets is like claiming that free speech rights, the right to privacy or the right to bear arms must be eliminated in order to address fiscal challenges.
It is a trade-off that is never acceptable.
States and municipalities can bargain hard with unions. Wisconsin certainly has done this over the years. In tight budget years, for example, state workers have often had their wages frozen and even cut through the use of mandatory furloughs.
But states cannot take away basic rights because those rights happen to inconvenience governors or lieutenant governors — or the political paymasters of those officials.
Over 30 years ago, Ronald Reagan, on the eve of being elected president of the United States, spoke of the emergence of the Solidarity organization in Poland, saying, “(The brave workers in Poland) remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. They remind us that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. You and I must protect and preserve freedom here or it will not be passed on to our children.”
“There are real financial constraints on states, but that is no excuse to seek to eliminate fundamental rights,” says Alison Parker, U.S. program director at Human Rights Watch. “State governments can negotiate cost savings with workers without violating their rights in the process.”
Parker is right about that. And she is right to note that international law on the right to bargain collectively applies in both private and public workplaces.
The United States played a critical role in developing the International Labor Organization’s 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. As an endorser of that declaration, the U.S. — and, by extension, American states — has pledged “to promote and to realize ... fundamental rights … (including) freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining.”
Parker notes, as well, that the United States is a party to and bound by its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. That covenant guarantees that all people have the right to protect their interests through trade union activity.
The Human Rights Committee notes the obvious: “Denying the right to collective bargaining would violate this international treaty.”
That Kleefisch does not get this provides one more argument for her recall and removal from office.
John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times. jnichols@madison.com
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Posted in John_nichols on Sunday, December 18, 2011 5:15 am


John Nichols, associate editor of The Capital Times, is the author of seven books on politics and the media. He writes about electoral politics and public policy for The Nation magazine, and is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times.
 
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