Fate of the Unions

What would it take to bring our politicians around? I asked one local political consultant (who asked to remain anonymous—he wants to keep working), and he tentatively pointed to the firefighter tragedy/scandal as an example of how public outrage against unions could be sustained. “It takes something horrible—one guy with coke and one guy with booze—and it’s finally something the public can get their heads around,” he said. “But in the end, eight months down the road, will the public still remember, or care? Will the politicians still have the courage to come forward?”

A fair point. Politicians will only come forward if the public outrage is sustained, and the public will only shed their union-outrage fatigue if they can be reasonably confident that this time their ire will yield results. Even though the unions have been their own worst enemy recently, with the cluster of exquisite chicaneries aforementioned, that alone won’t do the job. What’s needed is careful deployment of the tool they have been using so deftly against us for years: old-fashioned demagoguery.

One need look no further than the unions themselves, those masters of the dark art, for tips on how this is done. For years, anytime someone has ventured any criticism, it’s been met with a furious overreaction designed to stop the discussion dead. The police unions have always used the public safety card, and the teachers the “What about the children?!” card. The Boston school bus drivers once accused the city of being racist because it wanted to equip their vehicles with GPS systems, buses being symbols of busing, and by extension, integration. And I’m pretty sure you’re still not allowed, in this post-9/11 era, to criticize firefighters for anything.

So whoever is going to take this on should expect immediate, disproportionate retaliation, and prepare to respond in kind. As in any political campaign, it would be wise to keep an ad in the drawer, and when the cops start scare-mongering about how traffic details deter pederasty, and the teachers start spinning horror scenarios involving illiterate adult-children washing rats for a living, launch it. I’m just brainstorming, but here’s one idea: The ad opens with an image of a nice old couple losing their home because they can’t keep up with their property taxes. As they’re shuffling away, clutching a blanket and some photos of the grandkids, T workers wearing top hats and monocles rifle through their house, chortling at how gauche the wallpaper is. The couple wander aimlessly before finding themselves in a rough urban neighborhood, where they’re set upon by teenage hoodlums who aren’t in school because their teachers are on strike over the city’s refusal to meet their demands for daily hot stone massages. The hoods take everything the couple have, and then run off past an enormously fat cop sleeping on a nest of hundred-dollar bills in a cruiser by a construction site. The last shot is of the old couple trembling in an alley somewhere, perhaps with some vicious curs closing in. Onto the screen flash calculations of what the more egregious recent union abuses cost taxpayers, and finally the words “UNION SOLIDARITY? WITH WHOM?”

Or some such. The unions, who’ve long nurtured a victim complex to great political avail, will of course cry foul, howling about how without them we’d all be working 18 hours a day in some godforsaken cannery. But if the ad is played right, the sentimental underdog appeal that is a key part of their power will be eroded, and, with voter backing, real gains might be made.

Admittedly, it’s a long shot, but I still say there’s hope. To pull one from Nabokov (who, like union foes, was frequently accused by weasels of harming children), it may be but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness, but, hell, it’s something. Besides, in times of crisis, we moonbats must dream.