ABSTRACT
The year 2010 saw students and workers pouring out into the streets of most European capitals as social services got axed. The revolutions in the Middle East and the beginnings of austerity activism in the United States reminds a little of the period leading up to the revolutions of 1848 in Europe. During that time the mass discontent with shortages of jobs and food and public services produced worker protests. The ideology of 'everyone for himself or herself' is so powerful today. It is used to split the public sector workers and the private sector workers, and create the final death knell of the labor movement. The class warfare is targeting not just the public sector unions as new 'welfare queens' but the very existence of unions. In early 2011 a Gallup poll showed that 61 percent of the US public supported the right of public sector unions to exist and bargain collectively, opposing any restriction of these rights.
