NFL referees lockout makes Scott Walker a union supporter

The National Football League's scab officials are so bad, they've made union-busting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker a supporter of union workers:

After catching a few hours of sleep, the #Packers game is still just as painful. #Returntherealrefs
' @GovWalker via HootSuite Republican National Committee communications director Sean Spicer is another unlikely union supporter, at least when it comes to the locked out referees:
Seriously give the refs what they want -- these replacements are horrible
' @seanspicer via Twitter for BlackBerry® And Paul Ryan:
Paul Ryan on packers game: "give me a break! it is time to get the real refs."
— @samsteinhp via TweetDeck New Jersey state Senate President Stephen Sweeney says he's introducing legislation prohibiting professional sports from being played in the state with replacement officials:

'This past weekend in the NFL has not only made a mockery of a great sport, but shined a very bright light on how important fully trained and professional officiating is to player safety,' said Sweeney. 'We wouldn't allow a factory or construction site to operate without fully trained supervisors on hand to ensure the safety of employees. Why should we do anything differently when the job site is a playing field?'

Sweeney, a Democrat, worked with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to screw that state's public workers, so while his support for union workers isn't as newfound as Walker or Spicer's, it's also a bit of a turn-around.

Marcy Wheeler writes, of the people suddenly discovering that they value union workers, after all:

But consider: this is the same kind of fight on which the same union busters were on the other side, just weeks ago, on the Chicago Teachers strike. There, experienced teachers were'and still are'at risk of being replaced by inexperienced workers with no control over educational conditions captive to the profit-seeking motives of a bunch of capitalists. And yet on that fight, so many liberals (to say nothing of Scott Walker and Rahm Emanuel) cheered on busting the union with cheap replacements. Perhaps because we don't get to see how inexperienced teachers struggle to manage a classroom'just as scab refs struggle to manage a game'the effects of the union-busting are applauded, not jeered.

Decades and millions of dollars have gone into the campaign to make Americans believe that union workers are useless, overpaid, and greedy. One lockout isn't overthrowing all that. But it does turn out that when we see it in action, experience matters. Workers who nobody thought all that much of until they were gone start to look astonishingly good in retrospect when you see what the alternatives are. Now if more people would just realize that maybe the same thing applies off the football field, too.