This is what Democracy Looks Like?

So reads a sign in the rotunda of the Wisconsin state capital building in Madison. It describes the demonstration by thousands of union members against the attempt of the electorate’s representatives to pass legislation that would strip public employee unions of some of the collective bargaining tools first granted by state law in 1959.

Yes. 1959. Before that, unions of public employees union were generally prohibited from collective bargaining and striking, the widely held belief described by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, certainly a great friend of the union movement,

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

The legislation proposed in Wisconsin is a partial roll-back of that 1959 law and a 1967 extension of collective bargaining to state employees (the 1959 law applied to teachers and municipal employees). It’s partial because it preserves collective bargaining for wages. Why is it necessary? According to who supporters, without it, the very budget roll-backs that the unions say they are willing to accept can be blocked across the state town-by-town, school district-by-school district, and contract-by-contract.

But it’s not whether you or I are yea or nay on the proposed change, it’s rather whether there are votes cast at all. A teacher at the capital was asked, “shouldn’t you be teaching your students?” She answered, “I’m teaching them about democracy (here).”

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary,

democracy is a: government by the people; especially the rule of the majority, b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.

So, how is democracy defined by a mob intent on blocking a vote of the people’s freely elected representatives? Where is democracy implemented by fleeing across a border to thwart the will of a freely elected majority of the state’s citizens? Should the Republicans in the United States Senate have fled to Canada to block the vote on the president’s health system overhaul? Would that have been defined as democracy? Should our armed forces now be allowed collected bargaining over wages, benefits, and working conditions?

FDR recognized the absurdity of the people’s employees striking against the public, and of unions able to elect those with whom they would then bargain. It should be easier for us to recognize the same now that collectively bargained contracts have brought cities and states to the brink of insolvency.

One might well sympathize with those protesting in Wisconsin, but is that the way we should henceforth contest political decisions – on the street and in hiding rather than on the floor of a legislature?

Whatever it is that's going on in Wisconsin, it’s certainly not democracy.