Some of you may have heard about the vote yesterday in Massachusetts to limit collective bargaining rights of municipal employees on Health Care. That’s right, in Massachusetts. (Full Disclosure: I used to both live and work there)
Without debating the merits of this particular bill, it’s passage poses an interesting problem for organized labor in Massachusetts. It can whine all it wants about how bad it is, but what are they going to do about it? They can either:
1) Do nothing, and hope it gets killed/watered down in the Democratic Senate, or by Democratic Governor Deval Patrick.
2) Promise primary challengers now.
If the bill is signed into law – option one becomes irrelevant. And if they don’t do option two, then they leave this year not only with policies that they oppose, but also with the Democratic Party’s realization that Labor is unwiling to take any political risk to fight for the policy they claim to believe in.
If the Mass AFL-CIO doesn’t promise primary challengers to state legislators, it would just prove something I’ve certainly thought for a long time: Big Labor is nothing more than a shill for the Democratic Party, and protests in Wisconsin weren’t about "working man" at all.
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