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Sunday, February 27. 2011
Pride of Wisconsin
For more than a week it’s been a source of pride to be from the state of Wisconsin! Fourteen state senators left Wisconsin to block a vote that would eliminate collective bargaining rights and last weekend, over 80,000 Wisconsin teachers, firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and other state and local government workers picketed the state capital after Republican Governor Scott Walker proposed cutting the workers’ rights with his controversial budget bill.It was well below freezing in Madtown Saturday, but the movement was expecting a bigger demonstration than the one last weekend. Employee givebacks are not in question, as all the public sector unions involved agreed to the parts of the bill that reduce the benefits packages, thereby lowering the cost to the state. The only issues now are those concerning the elimination of the collective bargaining rights, which include forcing unions to recertify every year, letting employees opt out of unions and
One Republican, State Rep. Dean Kaufert, of Neenah, voted against Walker’s bill saying the proposals in the bill that would eliminate collective bargaining were an overreach. He does support requiring state workers to contribute to their health and pension benefits, but said that collective bargaining has been a proud tradition in Wisconsin for over 50 years and didn’t want that to be changed.
The demonstrations so far have been peaceful, and both the police chief and mayor of Madison applauded the demonstrators for their demeanor. What Mayor David J. Cieslewicz and Police Chief Noble Wray found disturbing were the governor’s remarks about hiring goon squads to disrupt the otherwise peaceful demonstrations.
In what turned out to be a prank phone call, Governor Walker said he and his “team” thought about planting troublemakers in the demonstrations but decided against it, his only fear being, “…if there was a ruckus caused, is that that would scare the public into thinking maybe the governor’s got to settle to avoid all these problems.”That was the governor’s only concern? A political calculation? He wasn’t concerned about the ethical, moral or legal issues involved? He wasn’t worried about public safety or that of local law enforcement? Rhetorical questions because obviously he was not. The governor never mentioned any of these concerns in a phone call he thought was from one of his biggest campaign contributors, David Koch. You know, of the infamous oil barons the Koch Brothers.
These are the billionaire brothers funding the Tea Party; they organized and paid for the so-called “grassroots” demonstrations we all witnessed in the past 18 months. Well okay, the Kochs paid others, like Dick Armey’s group, FreedomWorks, to organize the Teabaggers.
What these knuckleheads are really after has nothing to do with balancing budgets. Were that the case, this kerfuffle would be over. The Democrats and unions have already ceded everything financial the governor asked for in his budget bill. Nope, what the Koch Brothers and their Republican lackeys want is to break the unions. Reagan’s assault 30 years ago didn’t go far enough,
Now, three decades after Reagan fired the air traffic controllers — PATCO — less than 9% of America’s workers are unionized, the lowest number since 1932. Only 40% of public sector employees are unionized.
The rap on public sector union workers is that they make way more than private sector employees and they get “rich” benefits packages, both not true. On average, government workers who belong to unions pay approximately 5% of their wages to pensions and benefits and average $18,000 per year in pension benefits. Not even close to the five figure a year pensions some anti-worker hacks claim and certainly not rich.As for wages, many public sector jobs require higher education, or, in the case of public safety, put the employees in harm’s way so those workers do and should get compensated accordingly. But the average government worker is paid less than his or her private sector counterpart by as much as 20%, depending on the level of education. For instance, government employees with high school diplomas make about 5% less than their private sector peers, while government doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc are paid 20% less than their private sector peers. That’s the statistics from the Labor Department and those stats have been the same for decades.
What government employees lose in actual salaries they make up for with health and pension benefits.
The governor of New Jersey, himself a lackey of the Koch Brothers, got into the act a few days ago in Trenton, NJ, saying, “In Wisconsin and Ohio, they have decided 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.”
Since the beginning of the Labor Movement, Big Business has been doing its best to undercut unions, and Christie’s gambit is to pit the middle class against itself; those not in public sector jobs and those who are government workers. The fact is, union workers are the Middle Class. The real trouble for people like Chris Christie and Scott Walker is that the unions overwhelmingly back Democrats in elections. The union dues pays for many things, including political activism so if the Republican governors can break the unions and either shot off or slow down that flow of money, they can out compete their Democratic challengers when elections roll around.
When the Supreme Court shot down the law limiting corporate donations to politicians, the “Citizens United” case, people were justifiably upset because it means any business or industry can now donate as much money as it wants—anonymously—to any politician without any disclosure or oversight. The flipside to that is: so can the unions and you can bet that if the goose is gonna do it, the gander will as well.
The corporations have far more money to put into elections, but the unions have not just a lot of money to put into elections, they have the manpower to handle the footwork required to win elections. Fifty-one years ago my parents volunteered in the Kennedy campaign, mainly because we grew up Catholic and the Kennedy family is as well. But my dad was a dues-paying member of the IBEW — the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 494 — and John F. Kennedy was the candidate looking out for the workingman. My dad was Democrat, through-and-through.
Thanks to the union, my dad was able to retire from the city of Milwaukee with a decent pension that kept my parents living comfortably until they passed away. What Republican candidates want to do is take that away from all government employees, just as they have with so many private sector jobs. What they want to do is force you and me, if you’re not one of the elites, into deeper poverty. They want to create, once again, a two-class society, like what we had before unions came into existence. A society with the vast majority living in abject poverty, an extremely small minority at the top with all the money and control of government and society.That’s what they demonstrations in Madison are all about: protecting and preserving the Middle Class.
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