When I see the crowds protesting against laws that would strip the collective bargaining rights of government employees, I see an apt comparison to the crowds protesting for freedom across the Middle East. Some observers – Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and New York Times columnist David Brooks among them – think that the comparison goes too far. On Meet the Press, Sunday February 27, David Gregory wanted his guests who supported the protesters to denounce the signs that compared Governor Walker to Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak and to Hitler. I agree that we ought to just leave Hitler to history, but in many ways the comparison to Mubarak is not incorrect.

It is true that the people of Wisconsin and of the other states protesting similar legislation are not ruled by an autocrat who has held power for thirty years. It is true that they are free to peacefully assemble without worry of police brutality. It is true that their complaint is with governors who have been elected recently. The similarity that I see is that people are taking to the street both in the Middle East and in the Mid-West in the United States for the sake of winning and of keeping their human rights. And human rights are not ends in themselves; rather they are means to an end. The end is a better quality of life.

Income disparity in Egypt was obvious and harsh. An autocratic regime was also a kleptocracy that stole the wealth of the nation for the sake of the ruling family and of a small elite. Ordinary Egyptians faced high unemployment and increasing poverty. The situation was becoming more and more intolerable because now college educated young people could not find jobs, marry and start a life.

Income disparity is also a problem in the United States. Today the richest 1 per cent of the population of the United States takes home 24 per cent of the nation’s income. Writing in a series of articles for Slate.com, Timothy Noah says: “Income inequality grew through the 1980s, slackened briefly at the end of the 1990s, and then resumed with a vengeance in the aughts.”

People who work on Wall Street take home millions of dollars in bonuses while ordinary people – teachers, custodians, people who work at the DMV – are asked to take cuts in their take-home pay. However, the unions in Wisconsin have agreed to the budget cuts that the governor wanted. Now, he is after their rights to collective bargaining. This is a bridge too far.

In a telephone conversation where he thought he was speaking with one of his supporters, David Koch, he spoke about a plan he had to lure the Wisconsin Senate Democrats who left the state back. He said he would say he would talk with them, but that he had no intention of making any concessions.

This is a man who is clearly not acting in good faith. He wants the plan to go through his way or not at all. He not only wants the concessions from the union, including a reduction in their collective bargaining rights, but he also wants the power to sell certain state-owned power plants through no bid contracts. He also wants increased power to change Medicaid eligibility.

This move to weaken unions to the point of irrelevance is an assault on the middle class. The power the governor wants over Medicaid is an assault on the poor. None of these actions will do anything to address the problem of income inequality and the harm it does to our country. However, corporations and businesses who receive tax cuts while middle class and poor families are told they must sacrifice do benefit. This “my way or no way” attitude of the governor is more like that of an autocratic dictator than a governor of a democracy. Democracy requires compromise, and compromise means that one respects one’s colleagues who have also been elected enough to give up some of one’s demands.

Like young people in Egypt, many young people in the United States are graduating from college and cannot find decent employment that will allow them to marry, start a family and contribute to the progress of their country. Workers in Wisconsin and around the nation are defending the human right to collective bargaining as a means to the end of a better life.

We continue to see the question of budget cutting outlined in ways that divide the middle class. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said recently: ‘there can no longer be two classes of citizens: one that receives rich health and pension benefits, and all the rest who are left to pay for them.”

This is nonsense. Public sector employees are also tax-paying citizens. They usually earn less in salary than people with comparable skills in the private sector. More generous benefits are an important part of their compensation package. They are not the enemy. Collective bargaining rights are important in both the public and in the private sector. The two classes in America are the richest one percent and the rest. When elected officials work for the benefit of the richest and not for the benefit of the rest, they are not unlike the deposed president of Egypt. In my opinion, it is an apt comparison.