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Macomb, IL – No sooner had the new year started with at least one worker-friendly measure taking effect in Illinois than reality reared its ugly face.
The good news is that the legislature enacted a new wage-theft law that increases penalties to unscrupulous employers. Among the country's strongest such laws, it makes repeatedly requiring unpaid work or similar illegal acts a felony, and it increases penalties so that convicted employers would make back payments to the victims plus interest and pay a $250 fine.
The bad news is that lawmakers of both political parties seem to be discounting working people now that the election is over and joining the national trend of criticizing public employees.
A recent cover of The Economist magazine said, "The battle ahead: Confronting the public-sector unions." MSNBC's "Morning Joe" blasted greedy public-worker retirees. Politicians are floating an idea of states' declaring bankruptcy to avoid pension obligations. And Ohio's new Republican governor, John Kasich, pledges to cut public workers' pay, as have Republican and Democratic governors in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Oregon, New York, and arguably, Illinois.
The economy is in a shambles, and states' financial situations are affected and precarious. So, few are surprised that America's conservative extremists and their patrons in Big Business seek a scapegoats.
But it is surprising that their target is organized labor in general and public-sector unions in particular. (Full disclosure: I belong to a public-sector union, a university affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers.)
The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has launched a "Stop The Lies!" campaign focusing on what AFSCME president Gerald McEntee calls Right wingers' "false and absurd" myths about public workers.
McEntee said, "The Right Wing tries to divert attention from the simple fact that reckless, unregulated behavior of multi-millionaires on Wall Street caused unprecedented state budget shortfalls, the loss of 15 million jobs and the collapse of our economy. The rich and the Right have set their sights on public services and the men and women who provide them."
Springfield is threatening public employees in general and teachers in particular through a House education reform bill, according to political commentator Rich Miller, who sees the proposal as taking away the right to strike, limiting the power to negotiate, and creating new ways to lay off or fire teachers.
Robert Reich, ex-Labor Secretary and author of the new book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, said, "The public is being sold a big lie - that our problems owe to unions and the size of government and not to fraud and deregulation and vast concentration of wealth."
Reich shows that an increasing share of the benefits of economic production have gone to the richest of the rich. Three decades ago, Reich writes, "the top got 9% of total income. Now they take in almost a quarter. What's happened in the last 30 years is that the private sector worker has taken a shellacking."
That means the middle class can no longer be the consumers that the economy needs.
Other troubling measures in the General Assembly have ranged from a "Taxpayers Bill of Rights" limiting spending to Medicaid givebacks, all of which have some Democratic support.
Miller writes, "The same unions that pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into Senate campaigns are now fighting the very people they helped reelect just a few short weeks ago. [Gov.] Quinn heavily courted all sectors of organized labor and received gigantic contributions from pretty much everybody [but] the Democrats keep moving rightward."
All this despite evidence that disprove the biggest distortions. AFSCME shows that the average annual pension for Illinois state employees is $22,000. Also, the Economic Policy Institute reports that public employees are paid less than private-sector workers, even when factoring in employer-provided benefits.
Rutgers University professor Jeffrey Keefe, who wrote the study's report, said, "Private-sector workers earned average annual wages of $55,132, [compared to] the $49,072 earned by public-sector workers. When looking at total compensation including benefits, this gap narrowed but the private-sector workers still earned $2,001 more per year than public sector workers."
The new year still has the old nonsense, with Big Business ducking responsibility and blaming the victims.
Bill Knight is a freelance writer who teaches at Western Illinois University