In attempting to destroy union rights, Republicans, Tea Partiers, and others, not surprisingly, are taking a dangerous course that subverts democratic rights in America.

In turn, such actions by the nation’s Rightists will make democracy itself something that we will study as a historical oddity, rather than enjoying it as a reality in 2011.

What has been happening for weeks in Madison, Wis., between Governor Scott Walker and the people, is one of the key battles being fought by American workers for their right to organize themselves into unions and the small elite, which has come to control much of our economy and our political system.

It’s not just a battle over collective bargaining rights, although that’s what Walker (funded largely by the billionaire Koch brothers, of Koch Industries) is demanding Wisconsin public workers give up, among other things. In other parts of the country, similar battle lines are being drawn over another aspect of union contracts that irks the rulers on the right: seniority.

These are two vital parts to extending democracy in the workplace at stake, the right to collectively bargain a contract and seniority. Employers going back to the Robber Barons have wanted to eliminate unions, but The Great Depression 80 years ago gave impetus to President Franklin Roosevelt’s proposal to give workers the right to organize. For the laws passed on his watch to empower workers, he was called a traitor to his class.

The laws were passed in the mid-1930s and despite the attempts to have the U.S. Supreme Court declare the laws unconstitutional, they survived every assault that the rich could muster against them. Since then, workers have had the right to organize, but it has been made difficult to nearly impossible to express that right and form unions. Since a half-century before those labor laws were passed, the rich never stopped trying to find ways to subvert the rights of workers to negotiate their pay, working conditions, benefits, and pensions. They merely redoubled their efforts after 1935 and they have had considerable success.

How to convince the average American wageworker that unions are not good for him or her? It didn’t take long for right-wing think tanks to be created and funded by the millionaires and billionaires in the 20th Century. For most of the last century, they have been pumping out the propaganda in newspapers, on television and radio, in the classroom, and in the workplace: “Corporations good. Unions bad.”

In 1896, Jay Gould, when confronted by some of his railroad workers who might go on strike, uttered his famous vision of American workers: “I can hire one-half the working class to kill the other half.” Such has been the vision of those who would destroy labor unions and the struggles of workers for equity and a decent standard of living, ever since. The modern proponents of this “destroy the workers” mentality, like Scott Walker in Wisconsin, are merely the most recent manifestation of Gould’s view and his actions as industrialist and employer. Today, Walker simply carries water for the Koch brothers and others like them, but they all view workers from Jay Gould’s perspective.

As we’ve seen, the propaganda works. Many of the people bused in for a counter rally to the continuing demonstrations of public workers in Madison are working people, themselves, as are many in the Tea Party. There were some 700 of them in the past few days, but their presence was facilitated by Americans for Prosperity, a group that is financed largely by the Koch brothers and others. Spontaneous, it was not. Rather, in other similar circumstances around the country, they represent Gould’ one-half. They need to wake up to the reality that they have nothing in common with the rich who are bankrolling them, and everything in common with other American workers, especially unionized workers.

On the East Coast, the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, Angel Taveras, and his school board have fired all 1,926 of the teachers in the city school system. They can now be rehired as new teachers, with all that implies in terms of wages, benefits, working conditions, and seniority. There has been a move against teachers and their unions for many years, but it is just now coming to a head. Firing everyone eliminates any need to deal with teachers through collective bargaining and it certainly eliminates seniority.

This is happening around the country. The assault on teachers unions has been a priority for the Right for many years. They apparently feel that this is the time to go for it. It is not just collective bargaining and seniority that the Right is after; it is grievance procedures in union contracts and the security of a contract. It is claimed that it is too difficult to get rid of bad teachers, but there are ways to do it and it could be made less difficult if the school boards negotiated with the teachers unions to make the changes.

But in good times, when there is (was) plenty of money, no one seemed to want to tackle the problem, so they just let it ride…until now, when there is much less money. Now that school districts are in the hole for millions, they will make use of the crisis to destroy the unions, not solve the problems. This has been an unspoken goal of long standing for groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, and the right-wing think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Right to Work (for less) Committee, the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the American Conservative Union, the Federalist Society, and many more like them.

That’s what they are doing. In Albany, New York’s capital city, conservative and right wing groups are peppering the television airwaves with ads that tout elimination of the “last in, first out” policy of reducing teaching staff. Their whole shtick is “meritocracy,” which means eliminating seniority and keeping “younger, excellent teachers” and allowing schools to get rid of teachers who have 15 or 20 years of teaching experience.

What they’re saying, without saying it, however, is that younger teachers work cheaper and, thus, save the district money. It’s easy to see that eliminating seniority is merely an economic sleight-of-hand to get rid of teachers who have been around longer and “cost” more money. Elimination of seniority is destruction of the union contract. Those who have ever worked for wages (railroad section hand or teacher) know what favoritism is. They also know the meaning of nepotism and what “kissing up to the boss” means. Eventually, elimination of seniority degenerates into the farthest thing from “meritorious” service or behavior. It’s human nature and that’s why union contracts have seniority clauses, just as they have grievance procedures.

All of these things are included in union contracts because they provide protection of the rights of workers. The entire concept of a union contract is to bring a measure of fairness to the workplace and to ensure that workplaces are safe and healthy.

What politicians like Walker, Mike Huckabee (former governor of Arkansas who hopes to be the GOP presidential candidate in 2012), and Mitch Daniels (governor of Indiana) are about is nothing less than the destruction of the rights of American workers in workplaces of every description across the country. If they can bring this about, they believe Corporate America’s worries are over.

They always couch their assault in this manner: “we don’t hate the teachers (substitute any worker), we hate the union.” This is a mantra for those who want, simultaneously, to withhold the right of workers to represent themselves on the job, but want the support and loyalty of those same workers in other ways, including political.

Across the country, workers seem to sense that what is going on in Wisconsin, Rhode Island, and other states and other cities is a showdown. Even as the politicians tell workers that “the people” support elimination of collective bargaining rights, polls show that American workers (and that’s most of us) are not so dumb. At least two national polls show that upwards of two-thirds of those polled do not want to lose their collective bargaining rights. That’s because this is a core issue involving our freedom. Worker rights represent the everyday functioning of the Bill of Rights and reflective of the constitutional rights enjoyed by Americans. Those rights will not be given up easily. (There’s even talk in many places about a general strike to protect them.) Judging by the resolve of American workers everywhere, they won’t be given up at all.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.