It's the latest battle in the corporados' decades-long assault on the middle class.
Riffing on the first few paragraphs of an excellent new article from Alternet:
While our social safety net is under attack, record corporate profits are deemed off-limits in discussions about how to close the budget gap. With our severe economic crisis in its fourth year, the crisis itself is about to be used to batter the remnants of the social welfare state. Having decimated aid to the poor over the last 30 years, especially in the United States, the economic and political elite are now intent on strangling middle-class benefits -- namely state-provided pensions, health care and education.
The initial neoliberal assault under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher reorganized the capitalist economy in part by hammering private-sector unions into submission. This was accomplished, in part, by putting labor back into competition with itself, i.e. by finding and utilizing plenty of very competitive (low-cost) labor elsewhere around the globe. Industrial production was offshored, deregulated, and used to launch frontal assaults on labor rights, organizing and solidarity.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Corporate-America-s-New-Pl-by-Richard-Clark-101218-621.html