http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704171004576149003027310600.html?mod=googlenews_wsj http://rt.com/usa/news/wisconsin-protest-anti-union-labor-rights/
Protesters are rallying against a bill to eliminate the public employees’ collective bargaining. My opinon is that it’s long overdue. If you feed at the public trough, you shouldn’t be able to strike. Remember PATCO?
Disclosure time: I’m military, so I don’t have the right to strike. My dad was in a union, because it was required for his job, but he hated strikes, because he felt that most of them were trumped up to display the union’s power, not because the company was treating the employees unfairly. AT&T was a good employer back then.
This bill will push half the cost of employees’ pension and 12.6 of their health care costs onto the employees’ shoulders, which I feel should be phased in over several years.
It will remove collective bargaining for raises over the Consumer Price Index without a public referendum – reasonable, IMO.
It will allow employees to not pay union dues, which goes to lobby legislators, so that’s good, too. Each year, they will have to vote as to whether to stay organized, which I think should be struck. Maybe a provision that at any time, if enough members call for it, a vote will occur on the issue, but the union shouldn’t be saddled with a requirement to vote on it’s fate annually.
In return for all the employees lose in this bill, the governor promises no furloughs or layoffs. Without it, he says he’ll have to layoff 6,000 people. Predictably, the unions are against it. They have to be. So is the president, who receives a lot of support from unions. He decried it as an “assault on unions”, which it is and should be.
"I think it's very important for us to understand that public employees, they're our neighbors, they're our friends," Mr. Obama said. "These are folks who are teachers and they're firefighters and they're social workers and they're police officers." Yes, they are, but we aren’t getting out of this without pain. Somebody’s going to lose, and this sort of loss is more sustainable than 6,000 jobs going away.
Schools are closed because 40% of teachers called in sick to protest. That ought to get them a suspension without pay or other comparable reprimand – they’re lying to their bosses.
Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO called the bill "an attack on organized labor and middle class values." It’s an attack on organized labor, yes. They brought it on themselves with unrestrained greed. It is not, however, an attack on middle class values, because the middle class is all about making it, preferably on your own honest efforts.
The protesters want to have a “citizen’s filibuster”, keeping up the protests into ‘unsociable hours’ so the legislature can’t pass the bill. That’s a potentially dangerous precedent. If lawmakers don’t pass enough bread and circuses, the mob will hold them hostage until they do.
My take: this is a necessary and good idea, it just needs to phase the expenses in over several years so employees have time to take on the burden gradually, and the annual vote needs to be turned into a one-time or as-called-for-by-members basis.
So, what to do you think? “It’s eeeevil” is not a valid response. If you don’t like it, do you have alternate solutions?
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