Yesterday, Tom Moran, Editorial Page Editor for the Star Ledger, responded to a post noting his statement that he supported the bulk of Christie’s agenda.
Tom Moran here.
No, I am not for union busting, for the record. I do think teachers should pay for health care, that cops shouldn’t take home $100,000 in unused sick time, that when we offer such generous deals, the cost lands prmarily on middle-class property tax payers.
I also do not think the alterantive, raising state taxes by $120 billion over the next 30 years, was feasible.
So if we didn’t contain these costs, we would have to shrink government far more drastically than we have. We’d lose more teachers and cops, and we’d have no money to do progressive things, from expanded preschool to subsidies for green energy.
To me, that’s crazy. And I draw a distinction between state workers, who are not overpaid, and whose union, the CWA, has made reasonable concessions. The problem is the overly generous deal that cops, firefightes and teachers had. I don’t like cutting those benefits, but give me a better solution.
Calling that union busting is just silly, a shrill lattempt to polish left credentials. And boycotting the Ledger becuase I have the nerve to present these views is, to me, a temper tantrum that makes as much sense as the tea party.
When I say bulks of Christie’s agenda, I mean the biig stuff: the pension and health reforms, and most of the education reform stuff, which is also shared by President Obama and Cory Booker.
If I am the demon on the right for this blog, then you are speaking to very tiny slice of America, and making yourselves irrelevant.
But feel free to disagree with me! This America, and I will still stop in and read the site.
In other words, Moran confirmed that he supported exactly what he was being accused of supporting. He clearly does not want his position to be known as union busting because that is negative and the CWA twitter account retweeted the story, which includes a call for a boycott, three times in one day. Any members seeing the tweets would probably consider saving their Ledger money to pay for their increased health care costs that Moran supported/supports.
Since he was kind enough to come on Blue Jersey, I will give Tom Moran the benefit of the doubt and submit he may not know he supports union busting. But in any case, he does.
As was pointed out in Blue Jersey’s Ed Reform 101 Series, Christie’s agenda on the “education reform stuff” is absolutely designed to weaken labor rights and in many cases get rid of a unionized workforce – also called union busting. That’s why (wait for it) Christie has been attacking the teachers union with Moran’s apparent encouragement.
This led to one of Blue Jersey’s writers to respond to Moran this way:
I hoped to make clear that, if anything, Mr. Moran may in fact support the hyperbolic “union busting” in numerous substantive ways which he simply does not perceive, in total, as an attack on the rights of workers. I’ve already asked elsewhere on this thread for a review of Moran’s epistemology on the bucket issue of education reform. I’d like to know what informs his decision to support it. Knowing that will help all of us understand how his perception of the general issue does or does not include the important labor rights issues which are inextricably braided to the conversation. “I know that reform detractors say X, but here is why I think they are wrong and here is the evidence I used to draw my conclusions.”
So yeah, Tom can say he doesn’t support “union busting,” but if we want to favor clarity and substance over hyperbole and catch phrases, the proof is very much in the pudding, whether he realizes it or not.
That hits the point on the nose. Just because Moran does not see himself as a union buster, merely as someone who supports Christie’s Agenda, does not mean he is not one or is not supporting policies that will lead to the weakening and busting of unions.
As for the future, Jazzman has asked some great questions that Moran should answer if he wants to let people know more about his positions.
