Public unions objecting to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's plan that will save 6,000 jobs flooded the state capitol in protest. 40% of Madison area teachers called in sick.



Those teachers should all be fired. Unfortunately they cannot be fired because their union protects them.



Please consider this amazing video from the Wisconsin state capitol building.







Time Magazine reports Public Workers Protest in Wisconsin



Thousands of Wisconsin's union workers and supporters crowded into the state capitol in Madison for a second day to protest a bill that would strip key collective-bargaining rights from public employees. The measure, introduced last Friday by new Republican Governor Scott Walker, would take away public-worker unions' ability to negotiate pensions, working conditions and benefits. State and local workers would have to foot more of the cost for their pensions--around 5.8 %--and more than twice that percentage of their health-care costs. Nearly all public workers--the bill exempts police, firefighters and state troopers--would be able to bargain only for salary, and any wage increases would be tied to the Consumer Price Index. (Raises beyond that capped figure would require a special referendum.)



“I'm just trying to balance my budget,” Walker told the New York Times. “To those who say why didn't I negotiate on this? I don't have anything to negotiate with. We don't have anything to give. Like practically every other state in the country, we're broke. And it's time to pay up.” He says the measure will help avoid up to 6,000 layoffs.



The measure has infuriated the state's 175,000 public-sector employees, who say they're being scapegoated by a governor whose party has no love for unions. Other newly installed Republican governors, from Florida's Rick Scott to Ohio's John Kasich, have zeroed in on cutting state-employee rolls and rights as a way to close sagging budget gaps. But Walker's plan, which guts entrenched rights, is perhaps the most dramatic. "It is up to us to fight for the right of workers to have a collective voice on the job," said Wisconsin AFL-CIO president Phil Neuenfeldt. "This proposal is too extreme."

Walker's Proposal Not Extreme Enough

Teachers Should Be Fired

Washington Post Columnist Compares Uprising to Egypt

In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In the United States, by contrast, February is shaping up as the cruelest month workers have known in decades.



The coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens of thousands of Egyptian workers went on strike beginning last Tuesday.



But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo, one state government in particular was moving to topple workers' organizations here in the United States. Last Friday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin's new Republican governor, proposed taking away most collective bargaining rights of public employees. Under his legislation, which has moved so swiftly through the newly Republican state legislature that it might come to a vote Thursday, the unions representing teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose the right to bargain over health coverage, pensions and other benefits. (To make his proposal more politically palatable, the governor exempted from his hit list the unions representing firefighters and police.) The only thing all other public-sector workers could bargain over would be their base wages, and given the fiscal restraints plaguing the states, that's hardly anything to bargain over at all.



It's a throwback to 19th-century America, when strikes were suppressed by force of arms. Or, come to think of it, to Mubarak's Egypt or communist Poland and East Germany.



Our unions have already been decimated in the private sector; the results are plain. Corporate profits are soaring, while domestic investment, wages and benefits (particularly at nonunion companies) are flat-lining at best. With nobody to bargain for workers, America increasingly is an economically stagnant, plutocratic utopia. Is everybody happy?



American conservatives often profess admiration for foreign workers' bravery in protesting and undermining authoritarian regimes. Letting workers exercise their rights at home, however, threatens to undermine some of our own regimes (the Republican ones particularly), and shouldn't be permitted. Now that Wisconsin's governor has given the Guard its marching orders, we can discern a new pattern of global repressive solidarity emerging - from the chastened pharaoh of the Middle East to the cheesehead pharaoh of the Middle West.

If Jackasses Could Think

Collective Bargaining is Extortion

obligation

have to

have to

voluntary

pretend

Collective Extortion

Give Up the Bucks

SEIU Spokesperson Threatening California Lawmakers with Union Retaliation

Colorado Teachers Unions Abuse Non-Union Teacher Paychecks



New Jersey Governor Chris Christie explains how public sector unions control politicians

Governor Christie Explains Who Is To Blame For Teacher Layoffs

California Treasurer Bill Lockyer on Public Sector Union Influence



Armand Thieblot on Public Sector Unions (part 1)

Armand Thieblot on Public Sector Unions (part 2)

Unions Under Attack

Uniquely Dysfunctional Relationship

Fred Siegel, a historian at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, has written of the “New Tammany Hall,” which he describes as the incestuous alliance between public officials and labor.



“Public unions have had no natural adversary; they give politicians political support and get good contracts back,” Mr. Siegel said. “It’s uniquely dysfunctional.”

Freedom of Choice

No person should be forced to join a union to get a job, nor should union dues be used to extort money from taxpayers.

Please Read the Following Paragraph Carefully and Guess Who Said It

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.



The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.



Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."