Beneficial unions
The recent election returns in Wisconsin (“Wis. governor survives recall.” June 6) may be a harbinger of the demise of the middle class. In voting to neuter public unions, the people of Wisconsin have divorced themselves from the fate of these public employees. This separation, although touted by many as being beneficial to the American public, is in reality the opposite.
Readers of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” should take the time to read John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” Rand’s fiction was a fairy tale about the benevolence of capitalism. Steinbeck’s novel was a fictionally historic account of the ravages of capitalism.
What the middle class has to relearn is that unions, by their existence, forced nonunion employers to give their workers benefits. The result of the present-day conservative juggernaut’s destruction of unions will be a decimated middle class, one dangerously similar to what we had during the horrible depression of the Thirties.
The policies that brought about that depression are now in vogue with, even demanded by, a modern right-wing assault and weak left-wing acquiescence. Sadly when the depressing results of right-wing hubris swallows the middle class, there will be no left wing left to rescue them.
Maloey E. Jones
Wake Forest
