You know, the Texas labor movement is a funny thing... Some very radical people have come out of Texas, including anarchists like Lucy Parsons or Commies like Emma Tenayuca. But, living only a few miles from Halliburton;s downtown HQ, I can say this is definitely Bush country. Oddly enough, Dallas' only daily - the arch-conservative Dallas Morning News - has recently editorialized in favor of establishing a state form of OSHA that augments federal OSHA, and which would provide for even TOUGHER workplace regulation due to a recent scandal involving the deaths of some workers at a plant hq'd in Alabama. (The News portrayed it as a case of these funny Alabamans who think they can get away with treating Texans like dirt and chastised anyone who would hold "a belief that people are worth less than productivity.") The DMN also ran a positive article about a United Steelworkers effort to organize some public sector employees here.
Those who aren't familiar with the sort of tone one finds often in the Dallas Morning News may not think this is a big deal, but those of us who must suffer this insufferably anti-labor, corporate daily have found it surprising. The "smaller is better," faux libertarian posturing in the right-wing government here is still preferred. At his gubernatorial inauguration, our new Gov Rick Perry, in the face of a budget crisis that threatens to destroy what small social programs there are, declared, "The larger government grows, the smaller the circle of freedom."
He wasn't waving the black flag of anarchism or reading from Bakunin when he said this, though. He of course only means some parts of the govt. I doubt he's going to oppose his former boss Bush's stance on the PATRIOT Act or on defense spending. Perry then submitted a budget that contained nothing but zeroes.
"You've got to be kidding," Waco Democrat and State Rep. Jim Dunnam responded when he heard about this. "If it's true, then why didn't we just elect a weather vane for governor? At some point, the governor as the leader of the state is going to have to show us how this is going to be done. If he doesn't, we might as well stand outside 7-Eleven and let the first 20 people that show up be governor...This is just to confuse people about what's going to happen."
Brian
On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, twright at ziplink.net wrote:
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> >Just how many union members are there in Texas? My cliched Yankee
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"At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"Il etait enfin venu, le jour ou je fus un pourceau!" - Comte de Lautreamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, 4th Hymn, Strophe 6