> Among the overlapping categories that you listed, the only
> sector that's relatively well organized in America are
> government employees. According to the BLS, "About 36
> percent of government workers were union members in 2004,
> compared with about 8 percent of workers in private-sector
> industries" (at <http://www.bls.gov/
> news.release/union2.nr0.htm>). That is a huge gap. When the
> only stronghold of organized labor becomes workers whose
> wages and benefits directly depend on tax dollars, which in
> turn depend on profits produced by the work of unorganized
> workers, organized labor has a big political and economic
> problem at hand.
I am not sure if the title "unproductive" is tongue in cheek, but even if it is not, it is still inappropriate. Would you say, tongue in cheek or not, "Spics and n-words are the best organized workers in the USA?"
Calling government workers unproductive is an invective straight out of the neo-liberal propaganda handbook, and if I were to name only one thing in the world "bullshit" that would be on a very short list. This is, in essence, a spin designed to bamboozle the public that privatization is beautiful. In reality, government workers are not just highly productive, professional and efficient individually, but far more importantly they are more productive (i.e. producing more utility relative to resources used) in terms of production of utility for society as a whole.
The dreaded t-word is nothing but a payment for collective goods - same as insurance premiums or subscriptions (tuition or medical plans, phone or cable tee-vee installments, etc.) paid to private businesses - but the neo-liberal spin doctors either fail to see it or do not want you to think so. But unlike the private enterprise, which has to include profits in its operating expenses, government (and public entities) does not - it can (and does!) operate at its cost. Therefore the premiums the government charges for the collective goods are by definition lower than those charged for the same good delivered by private outfits (which have to include profits). That difference in premiums charged for public goods is an obvious benefit to the public - but the spin doctors of privatization do not want us to think so. Therefore they came up with the whole name calling scheme - calling "taxes" a burden on people's back and private profits a benefit to society. This is pure Orwell - "slavery is freedom, war is peace" - the quintessential US spin capitalism in its purest form.
I understand that the neo-liberal spin meisters use that frame of thinking - after they are but mouthpieces of monied interests that benefit from fleecing the public. I also understand why the public thinks that way even while being fleeced - after all anti-intellectualist hostility to government is the defining feature of the US "kultur", and moreover this is perhaps one of the most heavily propagandized society in the world, so people have a lot shit put in their brains by the biggest propaganda apparatus ever assembled on the face of the Earth.
But why on Earth the Left is adopting the language and the frame of thought of the neo-liberal right is simply beyond me. What we should be saying instead is that "the workers that produce most public utility are also those who are most unionized" - which has an added benefit of being a fact rather than a semantic spin. In fact, changing the cognitive frame in which US-ers think about government is the absolutely necessary pre-condition of any meaningful progressive social change in this country. If this is not changed - the Left will be basically reduced to a tabloid, clowning around, scandalizing, and spinning its wheels on concocting cultural commodity for malcontents.
Wojtek