Whatever the legislative outcomes, the union-busting Republican governors of Wisconsin and Ohio already have lost — by nearly a 2-to-1 margin — public support for their attempt to weaken collective bargaining and balance their budgets on the backs of working people.

In a test of fundamental principle, the American sense of fairness has prevailed over the bullying of wealth and privilege. The motive was political, not economic. The complicit politicians, their cohorts and their financial angels have covered themselves with shame.

I celebrate this as someone who has never belonged to a union but who has seen firsthand the importance of the organized labor movement in creating and protecting the middle class.

During my 56-year association with The Kansas City Star, I recall one effort, possibly two, by The Newspaper Guild to unionize those of us who wrote for the paper.

What caused both efforts to fail wasn’t an intrinsic antagonism to unions. More than anything, it was the clumsiness of the organizers, who seemed to have little in common with actual journalists and no interest in the real concerns of writing people.

Yes, we were poorly paid. My generation of reporters began at $275 a month, with the shabbiest of benefits. But money wasn’t our grievance. The issue was the overbearing nature and ingrained conservatism of the entrenched old-timers who ruled the newsroom.

Reporters and younger editors wanted greater influence over the values and editorial priorities of the institution. But none of that seemed to interest the union organizers.

“Shorter hours” was the enticement of one of them. “And if you’re in the middle of a story when quitting time comes, you’ll have the right to just get up and leave.”

Whatever else he might have promised, that alone was fatal. So the attempt to organize the newsroom was decisively rejected.

But my other exposure to unionization was more positive. It was the example of my father’s workplace experience and the lessons I drew from that.

Raised by a widowed mother on a hardscrabble hill farm, he came to the city with only the most basic education and was lucky to find work at the municipal electric utility.

But he brought with him a gentle nature and an inexhaustible capacity for friendship and loyalty, and on the strength of those virtues he managed to make an entire career, until retirement, with that one company.

His associates there were like family. For other than his real family at home, his work was his world. I would almost be willing to bet that he never earned as much as $700 in any month of his life.

He never complained — not about wages. But all through my boyhood years there were times when the house was filled with a palpable but unspoken anxiety. For in those days few office workers had union representation.

In hard times, it wasn’t uncommon for clerical folk to be given a brutal choice: Either accept half a wage or clean out the desk and leave. Also there were periodic shuffles in top management of the company.

When a new boss took charge, reorganization was apt to follow. And that could result in consolidation of departments, with inevitable layoffs.

Though largely sheltered from the details of such worries, I could sense the tension in the air.

I remember, too, that, despite being entitled to annual vacation, my father sometimes was hesitant to take two weeks off all at once, for fear it might cause some department head to decide he was expendable.

Just when the office workers of the municipal utility became unionized, I can’t say. But it was well on in his working years. What I do recall with great clarity is the precious gift of relief that it brought.

For the first time in what ultimately would be his more than four decades of service to that company, he believed himself and his family safe.

It is a feeling to which, in a truly fair world, every working man and woman ought to be entitled.