Wisconsin's governor: Protest end of labor contracts, I'm dragging out the Guard

You can't possibly expect me to take anything Joel McNally writes seriously, can you?

Walker is finally reining in the out-of-control public unions. If the previous governor had been adult enough to do it, Wisconsin wouldn't be in the financial sewer it's in.

As for any "point" McNally wants to make, why doesn't he address the fact that the county would have gone bankrupt much sooner had it not been for Walker? Because Joel McNally doesn't have an honest bone in his body when it comes to politics.

 

Re: Wisconsin's governor: Protest end of labor contracts, I'm dragging out the G

What, the Pinkertons were booked up?

 

They'll be able to collectively bargain salary, but their benefits are being cut back to much more reasonable levels. As the JS story pointed out a couple days ago, these gold-bricks will be asked to pay more for their benefits package -- and it will mean they're paying HALF as much as most other states' employees. And Walker's new proposals will make some of that back for them by eliminating furloughs in the next deal. Everyone else is suffering and the state is going broke. It's time the public-union gravy train comes to a halt.

 

But you know as well as I do that these unions have been making concessions on wage based on their healthy benefits deal. Three weeks of furloughs is more than I had to take working for a newspaper.

I don't have a problem with bringing the overall cost package in line with the economic reality, I have a problem with how he's going about it.

Demonizing state employees won't be very helpful politically, either. The people gung-ho about it are already firm Walker supporters, such as yourself. The people he will piss off are all over the political spectrum.

 

It's always easier to gripe about how much better others have it rather than be introspective about how bad you're being fucked. The fact that the public sector has caught up to and surpassed the private sector is a great indication of just how big of a fuck job it is.

When I was growing up we had a family of four move into our neighborhood. Mom didn't work and dad....was a state government employee. I can still remember my neighbors standing around talking with my family. "I don't know how they're affording that house (a modest house that was probably valued at $48,000 in 1985). She doesn't work and....he's a state employee."

Fast forward 25 years and it's, "Can you believe these greedy motherfuckers?"

 

Also:

http://epi.3cdn.net/9e237c56096a8e4904_rkm6b9hn1.pdf

The research is timely. Newly sworn-in Gov. Scott Walker believes that public employee compensation must be cut to make it comparable to private sector pay at the state, local, and school levels. Walker is promoting public employee pay cuts, changes in collective bargaining laws, major benefits reductions, and a possible decertification of public employee unions as the antidote to the alleged overpayment of public employees in Wisconsin and the key to reducing the state’s budget deficit (Bergquist and Stein 2010).

However, the data indicates that state and local government employees in Wisconsin are not overpaid. Comparisons controlling for education, experience, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and disability reveal that employees of both state and local governments in Wisconsin earn less than comparable private sector employees. On an annual basis, full-time state and local government employees in Wisconsin are undercompensated by 8.2% compared with otherwise similar private sector workers.

 

An excellent point here. In Chicago, where it was once death to even suggest that city employees shouldn't have paychecks full of unicorns and benefits full of rainbows, Rahm Emanuel is leading the mayoral race despite making it clear that the knives are out. (Of course, some of that might be voters like my wife's uncle, a city retiree who might not realize that his cushy pension and benefits are going to get hit.) I think public employees -- at least the smart ones -- are recognizing that things are coming to a head.

What Walker's done will probably earn him huzzahs from the Tea Party crowd, but it's horrible negotiating, and horrible politics. Walker could have come out and presented evidence at how much current state salary and pension benefits are killing Wisconsin. It probably wouldn't have been hard. Then he could have said that he wants to reopen bargaining, or wants the unions to come to the table to get a mutually agreeable solution (if possible).

Then one of two things would have happened:

1. The unions would have said yes, and work would begin.

2. The unions would tell Walker to go pound sand.

Option No. 2 would have given Walker much more political cover to -- well, if not call out the National Guard, then say that a state of emergency needs to be declared because the situation was so dire, and because the unions refused to negotiate. He probably would have had a lot of people in Wisconsin behind him.

But now Walker, raising the specter of having troops firing on state workers, has just alienated a lot of voters who aren't in the Give State Workers Everything They Want Party.

Of course, the problem for Walker with option No. 1 is that so many Tea Partiers have declared that even acknowledging your enemy's existence breaks their Official Mark of Purity.

 

I believe Mizzougrad has said previously that he is from California. If he is, I will vouch for his assessment that government jobs and pay have by and large been recession-proof. This has changed over the past year, but the slow onset of furloughs, layoffs and pay cuts -- as well as a seniority-based system that allows people to slide over to jobs for which they are not qualified -- are very real out here.

 

I can deal with a Republican as governor, old tony, if that's the way it has to be. Just not Walker. He's an idiot. He's not endearing himself to many folks in Madison. He alienates people instead of trying to work with them.

 

Busting public employee unions is the first step toward the ultimate goal: busting ALL unions, freeing poor oppressed corporations to deal with employees on an individual basis.

Capitalism unleashed. The miracle of the marketplace.

 

Walker has been showing evidence of how government-worker benefits have been bankrupting the state (and Milwaukee County when he was county exec) for years. The unions have always been telling him to pound sand. And as for the National Guard angle, he's done nothing other than brief National Guard leaders in case there are massive employee strikes.

Trying to make it sound like another Kent State is on the horizon is a public-union tactic to try to sway sympathy from the gullible -- and based on what I've seen here, there are plenty of the gullible.

EDIT: Here is a JS "Politifact" rating Walker's statements on public-union benefits "true."

http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2011/feb/08/scott-walker/wisconsin-gov-scott-walker-says-state-employees-co/

 

Ok, that's health insurance premiums only.

My link factored all benefits.

And again, I said I have no problem with trying to get certain concessions, but I believe Walker should have at least attempted to bargain in good faith.