Protests in Wisconsin have drawn tens of thousands, and sparked protests in cities nationwide.

I heard a great joke this morning: A corporate CEO, a Tea Party activist and a union representative are sitting at a table. In the middle is a plate with 12 cookies. The CEO reaches in and takes 11 of the cookies, then  turns to the Tea Party activist and says, “Watch out for that union guy; he’s about to take a piece of your cookie.”

It would be funnier of it weren’t so true. Right now, I see posts all over Facebook from friends who are fed up with the unions because of the abuses they’re suddenly hearing about.

This is the same thing the wealthy on the right did with health reform. They villify the Medicare system and other public and public-private hybrid systems around the world in an effort to make working people think any government involvement in health care would be a bad, bad, socialist, commie think to do.

What they don’t tell you is that our health system was rated 37th by the World Health Organization because so many poeople lack access to it. Our life expectancy is 19th in the world.

Now they’re doing it with unions. I noticed a couple of friends had a story about some kind of union “abuse” this morning, and I know it’s the same thing. They own so much of the media that it’s hard to get the word out that unions are the things that gave us weekends, 40-hour work weeks, AND access to health care through our jobs, at least until they began to be stripped of power.

That started with Ronald Reagan firing all the air-traffic controllers in the 1980s, stripping of them of the right to strike for better working conditions. At the newspaper where I worked at the time, all the “back shop” people — the ones who pasted up the paper and got it ready for printing — were firesd for striking. Years later, a court would reinstate them, but not with back pay.

Newspaper mogul Dean Singleton knew in 1985 that he could settle with the Teamsters Union and screw the rest of them. He was, and likely still is, very adept at union busting. Gannett, even though it didn’t have unions, was a good company to work for in 1986. People were treated pretty well so there would be no need for unions. That didn’t last. With no union to protect them, employees were asked to do more and more as their numbers decreased. In Asheville, about two-thirds of the employees of the Citizen-Times have been laid off in the last four years.

At the same time, unions in the private sector have become less and less powerful as employers like the Koch Brothers threated massive layoffs — or to move their entire operation to South America and lay everyone off — unless the unions capitulate to their demands.

Now they scream about how powerful the public unions are. Not so much as they used to be, but more than many private sector unions for hourly employees. In the 1950s through the 1970s, unions negotiated a living wage for people who worked. If you worked a full week, you made enough to live on and perhaps buy the products you made.

Reagan started the union-busting, and it has been very successful in the private sector. Now we have to defend the public employees’ unions so we can start to rebuild the private-sector unions.

Unions defend workers’ rights. They are not evil, they are essential.

We can’t let the right take away our rights with smear campaigns. When you see it, stand up for the unions. Stand strong. Don’t back down unless you want to go back to the days of the Industrial Revolution, before unions came to the defense of the workers.