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Many of you may have heard about the ongoing crisis in Wisconsin, where 14 Democratic senators fled the state in order to prevent a vote on a bill that proposed to close a budget gap by forcing a 14 percent pay cut from teachers and other public servants, denying them the right to bargain collectively.
It is superficially a local issue, at least. Are the teachers being paid too much? Have they had it far too good for far too long?
Upon inspection, this kerfuffle instead turned into another manifestation of a tired political canard. Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker and his fellow Republicans in the State Congress turned a budget surplus into a deficit by giving tax breaks to corporations, which sounds eerily familiar.
The rationale behind this move, which later made it impossible for Walker “to negotiate in good faith [with the teachers]” because “[the state is] broke,” is businesses create jobs, but jobs are more akin to things being manna-handed down on high from benevolent businesspersons in this sense rather than a task or set of tasks one performs using acquired skills to earn money. One then uses this compensation to buy bread and watch “Jersey Shore.”
What the anti-tax crowd seems to misunderstand, perhaps deliberately, is that businesses do not create jobs. As basic macroeconomics — something which tea partiers claim to be intimately familiar with — explains, demand creates jobs.
A business operates by catering to a demand for a product or service. Its goal is to generate the maximum amount of profit possible, which it can do by two ways: increasing demand through advertising or prices, or decreasing overhead, either in terms of raw materials or outlays to workers. A business will only hire new workers if it cannot meet demand with its current staff.
Businesses, for their part, have discovered that we, the public, hate high prices and have become numb to advertising. They now prefer to squeeze their existing staff, using the specter of unemployment they themselves conjure, by refusing to hire in order to demand longer hours for less pay from their workers even as their profits soar higher than ever.
By continually lowering the bar, they make the relatively under-compensated public professions look good by comparison, creating a target for the embittered working-class’s misguided hatred. The teachers’ unions, which safeguard sane class sizes and adequate time for planning and preparation, are seen as unfair burdens on the taxpayer, extracting concessions far above and beyond what any private citizen could ever dream of having.
This is deeply ironic on multiple levels. The ability of workers to organize to demand fair wages and benefits from their employers has gone to a privilege — a vestigial organ excised from the body private, but still festering merrily away in the body public — an organ which Gov. Walker and his ilk are bravely amputating for the good of all.
Rather than organize themselves to demand better conditions, private-sector workers target the supposed greed of teachers’ unions even though any savings this stunt generates have already gone to the state’s wealthiest in the form of corporate welfare.
I, for one, stand with the teachers. These are people who contribute tangibly day-in-and-day-out to the health of our society. They provide children with the skills they need to become productive workers and they do it in conditions that would drive a humble columnist utterly bonkers.
The last thing anyone should want to do right now is pull the financial rug out from under teachers. Taking sides against them only starts a race to the bottom — one nobody wants to win.
Andrew Tomes is a second-year English and botany student.
