The New York Times reported this week that, faced with growing budget deficits and restive taxpayers, elected officials in many states are pushing new legislation to limit the power of labor unions, particularly those representing government workers, in collective bargaining. These state officials, according to the Times report, are looking for ways to curb the salaries and pensions of government employees.

We are told that in some states with Republican governors and Republican state house majorities, officials are seeking more far-reaching, structural changes that would weaken the bargaining power of unions, including private sector ones. The governor of one state is even threatening to take away government workers' right to form unions and bargain contracts.

Of course states are struggling with overloaded employee costs. How can they not be overwhelmed? Our leaders have immersed us in two unending bottomless pit trillion-dollar wars; we have suffered a cataclysmic recession that has its roots in the recklessness of the financial industry's unregulated excesses which continue to this day with obscene seven-, eight-, and nine-figure payouts to a privileged class who continue to receive more tax breaks that drive our economy further in the red, while our infrastructure is failing and unemployment is causing insufferable pain.

And who is targeted to absorb the blows? The guys who pick up the trash, put out the fires, police the streets, even in many cases teach our kids — as if restricting their rights to collective bargaining will somehow save the states and cities, themselves victims of declining revenues directly related to the mess that our leaders have forced us to continue to endure.

There is something very wrong with this picture!

Edward J. Gutman, Baltimore