RANT Union-bashing means a raw deal for everyone BY BRIAN C. JONES

If you anticipate a perfectly happy Labor Day, that means you aren’t a member of a union or someone who believes that unions are a force for good.

It’s been an awful year for labor, the latest in a string of awful years. On the state level, organized labor took a pasting when Governor Donald L. Carcieri won a two-year fight to force state workers to pay part of their health insurance premiums. As a reform, premium "sharing" has always seemed to me to be phony. It does nothing to hold down medical costs, but merely shifts money around. The boss pays a worker, then takes some of it right back to cover health premiums; a pay cut by any other name. Carcieri won this battle because many workers these days "share" health costs with employers. So when the rest of us look at public employees, we wonder why, if we’re being screwed, why not screw them, too.

Then there’s the stalled drive to offer union representation to up to 1300 women — many of them Hispanic — who operate child-care centers in their homes. A robust anti-union, and perhaps anti-immigrant, campaign has so far put off an attempt to override Carcieri’s veto of General Assembly-passed legislation.

Nationally, a mechanics’ union, itself unpopular within the labor movement, appears to have been outflanked by Northwest Airlines, which spent a year-and-a-half recruiting "replacement" workers (training substitutes on spare planes parked in the Arizona desert). Northwest is using the strike to revamp work practices, while other unions ignore the mechanics’ walkout.

What these events have in common is the betrayal of working people by other working people, and it’s the reason that the labor movement is collapsing.

When we look at state workers with fully paid health premiums, our response ought to be: that’s a real benefit — a goal the rest of us ought to push for.

If the Northwest mechanics’ union is a dislikeable outfit, the airline’s use of scab labor shouldn’t be condoned by anyone with a conscience.

I can’t figure the backlash against the day-care providers, since they are among the most admirable of workers, with the gumption to start their own businesses, and the skill to take care of our children while we’re at work.

I also believe there is no such thing as a "good" union. Unions are just as imperfect as any other institution: the church, banks, newspapers, Enron’s accounting firm, and so on. But the union agenda is unquestionably positive: a paycheck that can support a family (the house, a car, education); protection from bullying bosses; medical and retirement benefits; a little vacation time.

The problem is that most workers don’t see the union agenda as their own — quite the opposite. Most of us would rather have state workers get the same raw deal we’ve got; see day-care workers stay low on the economic ladder; and either condone the use of scabs or become one. But when we give up the union agenda, we give up on America itself.