“The drama of 2011 will be cuts in state and municipal budgets in the United States”

This is what George Soros said in Davos this week in an interview I saw on CNBC. He went on to say that the issue was “very political”. Soros explained that the republicans wanted to weaken the unions, who were the main supporters of the Democratic Party. Cutting state and municipal budgets will cut heavily into public service staffing and therefore union membership.

Soros is an insightful thinker. Coming straight after a Global Unions’ conference on organizing in Washington last week, it was striking to hear the billionaire “retired” hedge fund manager and philanthropist come out with the same analysis as trade union leaders. In Washington, ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow pointed out that union membership in the private sector in the US was down to 7 percent while public sector membership was still high. “So you would expect the public sector unions to be the target of the anti-union forces”, she said. NEA President Dennis van Roekel and AFT President Randi Weingarten highlighted this trend with riveting examples of attacks on teachers and their unions in the US. Paul Moist, President of the large Canadian Public Sector Union, CUPE, had a similar story to tell.

I had the task of presenting the joint union plan to combat this assault, arising out of the successful conference “Quality Public Services: Action Now!” held in Geneva last October. That plan focuses on the local level, where ordinary families need good public services, and will feel the brunt of the cuts.

The plan is very clear that this must be a campaign directed to all working people – not only those in the public sector. It will focus on the reality of the cuts in essential services. It will aim to show that “Quality Public Services” is not an abstraction but concrete and real. It will get underway in cities and regions around the world, for the cutting of public services at local level is common to many countries. It will really link the global with the local.

The plan was approved at the Council of Global Unions meeting at the OECD in Paris this week. For more details, go to www.qpsactionnow.org.

From Paris, several of our union leaders headed for Davos, to try to get key union messages heard there. I checked the CNBC website for the Soros interview. I found the quote at the top of this item. He made the point that in the US, states are required to balance their budgets, and since tax revenue has dropped and additional Federal funds are unlikely, they will have to cut spending. This is precisely the point we made after the crisis first hit two years ago, and reiterated when the trend of fiscal consolidation gathered momentum in 2010, as we saw at the G8 and G20 summits of Toronto and Seoul. He also said that the fiscal crisis now affecting many US states was somewhat like the one that hit countries like Greece and Ireland in the Eurozone – an interesting point.

But I couldn’t find on the website what I heard Soros say about the politics and the union-busting agenda. I wonder why. Did I just dream it? Or was that part not included because it did not fit the narrative coming out of business circles these days?