Collective Bargaining

I got up this morning and wrote a letter to the editor.  Not a common practice for me.
Here is the text:

I have absorbed news reports from Wisconsin, and other states, in dismay this past week.  I needed only to remember the courageous efforts of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the sanitation workers strike in Memphis, TN in 1968 to know that as a pastor in our community I must speak out in defense of public worker collective bargaining rights.

My Unitarian Universalist faith calls me to “affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of all humans.”  Like the sanitation workers strike, the protests in Wisconsin are not about balancing a budget, but about human dignity.  An assault on collective bargaining in one state has the potential to spread to all of our United States.

Like Wisconsin, in Ohio stripping public employees of their rights to bargain will not demonstrably save the state money.  Yet, when the sponsor of the legislation was asked why she wanted it passed, she replied, “It’s my philosophy.  We think that public employees should not have the rights that they have now.”

WE ARE THE PEOPLE.  Together we create the best democracy in our world.  If workers lose their voices (even after agreeing to bargain), it is just one more step in the systematic elimination of the middle class.

In his last speech, King preached: “we have the opportunity to make America a better nation.”  A similar opportunity is before us now.  Stop this wave of injustice.  Stop the momentum toward an only rich or poor economic reality in our county.