It seems like everyone is piling on public service unions, even some people who might surprise you. One of the common criticisms is that the unions have too much clout with politicians. If that is the case, then why are a bunch of newly-elected politicians trying to destroy them, and why do they have legislatures willing to go along with their schemes?
Another theme is that public service employees don’t give a crap about the taxpayer (as though they were not taxpayers themselves) and that their benefits are too generous. I’ve been over part of this. Before the emergence of public unions, public employees were compensated significantly less than people in the private sector. The reason? Much of the private sector work force was unionized. What changed is not the public employees got a better deal, but that the private sector became deunionized, lost the right to bargain collectively, and saw their compensation and benefits stagnate or fall. But I have another question. Do taxpayers want public workers to get the smallest possible salaries? Do they want a government administered by paupers?
What’s really happened is that people who can’t bargain collectively have been screwed for so long that all of a sudden they looked around and realized someone else was getting a better deal. Now it’s time to make sure the teachers are screwed as bad as the rest of us.
It seems to me that people are taking the wrong lesson from all of this. But, what the hell, might as well fire them.
The NJ radio station righties have been screaming about the teacher’s union since they went on the air.
There are no facts, only an agendas.
I know that much of the time we get the “Don’t confuse me with facts” blank stare from these fools, but if you should encounter a fence sitter, here’s some things you can throw at ’em:
There are similar reports and papers for many other states as well.
very interesting, thanks
I smell an agenda not an observation.
Who were the “noisiest teachers” they got salary data for? Did they violate privacy rights to get it?
And how typical are those numbers of Wisconsin salaries?
I smell a big rat here. This says nothing at all about what Wisconsin workers, who might well have the highest proportion of union members in the US, think about this.
Don’t believe what any publication in Washington tells you about what is happening outside Washington. I think that the conservative paper in Green Bay represents the sentiments of that relatively conservative bunch of Wisconites better. They said that Walker made a mistake in framing it as a salary and benefits issue and writing the bill to strip collective bargaining. That would seem to indicate that even in Green Bay, readers are sympathetic with the public employees.
MSM is a joke. They do not report news, they report an opinion. I have noticed several television shows under estimating the number of protesters involved.
Yet, when the teaparty parties,they spend the entire day covering the event. They spend their time looking for people who hate Obama.
“Don’t believe what any publication in Washington tells you about what is happening outside Washington.”
Good advice. The spew from inside The Village never ends, but not far from the aforementioned publication comes this alternate view, not hard to find at all if one tries.
For people to be public employees, there has to be a public. For people to have careers in public service, there has to be a public.
And there are extremely powerful forces in this country who want to kill off the very notion that there is even such a thing as ‘the public’.
It’s a little easier to pull that off when the public employees are all gone.
With these guys, there is the individual and there is the state; no other institutions exist. There is no public, just the state. And they want to starve the state and drown it in a bathtub.
And other large institutions, corporations and churches and what else(?) become free to control individuals.
So puzzle me this. When the state is gone, who enforces contract and grants limited liability? Who does the military belong to?
Privatization used to mean freeing oneself from the king’s or priest’s household and taking one’s place as a member of the public. Now it means freeing oneself from the public and putting oneself back in the king’s or priet’s household. (See Paul Veyne, editor, A History of Private Life.)
Boo, you’ve hit the nail on the head, as usual. The republican strategy is to make the pie smaller. Inevitable result? People are less willing to share.
Well, it’s to make the portion of the pie not being eaten by their buddies smaller. Or, to riff on FDR, what the Republicans want is ten chickens in every tenth pot.
Exactly.
Great line.
Combine what Boo said with the half-century drumbeat that government is bad, government workers are useless, and you get the endgame we’re seeing today. Also worth noting: I absolutely believe the tone would be very different if the teabagger/GOP types went to a government office and saw white faces and heard “American” accents. But in most places where the public interfaces with government they see the Other, who exert some power over them, which is intolerable.
Hence the guy Reuters quoted from WI: I worked in the factory 20 years and have to pay [7% or whatever] for health insurance, so why am is supposed to subsidize special treatment for union members?
Of course no “journalist” asked why, if that was what he wanted, he didn’t join a union.
If it’s Wisconsin, the guy might be a rank-and-file member of a beaten-down union that has given concessions for a quarter century. There are rank-and-file union members who voted for Walker. Not all of them are awake yet.
This they did not do “all of a sudden.”
Why aren’t they asking why they have to subsidize (at much greater cost) free health care and roads in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Answer: Because the Wurlitzer isn’t telling them to do so.
The wealthy are taking full advantage of the portion of the population the Fairness Doctrine protected most.
I just do not understand why so many people hate teachers. Is it like how everyone hates Congress but likes their congressman? They all like teacher’s in their communities but all these other teacher’s are bad. They are probably jealous of weekends and summers off. Most Americans would not even walk in some of these inner cities let alone work there.
Here is a very inspirational video of protests in Madison set to a great tune by Arcade Fire. Pass it along because it is fantastic. Makes me proud to be on their team.
http://vimeo.com/20089255
It’s the illusion that teachers are paid 12 months pay for 9 months work. What folks do not know is the scale of pay compared to similarly educated professional workers.
It is also the fact that they know some very skilled teachers who got fed up with the low pay, incompetent administrators, and bad teachers who got a pass from administrators. And then left teaching. Indeed, some of the gripers might be those who left teaching.
Also the hours of work they put in during the 9-10 months is completely misunderstood. A teacher cannot come unprepared to class – that means evenings and early early mornings- and cannot step out for a few minutes for a coffee break – which means an intense day with only scheduled lunch time or breaks. Teachers spend hours after class grading papers (carefully, papers handed back are part of the learning process) and preparing the next days lessons. In many underfunded schools, teachers spend their own $ for supplies for the students – which means taking time to shop for supplies (e.g. books, art supplies, whatever). Teachers are often involved on weekends with school events. It’s extremely annoying to see how the hard work teachers put in is totally misrepresented by ppl collecting large paychecks.
It appears to be blaming the Public Workers for the Wisconsin Budget deficit. Wisconsin Republicans are scapegoating the average worker.
I think a couple of aspects of this situation are really important:
This will happen on the national scale as well. After the Republicans take over the national government in 2013, the definition of a moderate Republican will be one who does not vote to repeal the Minimum Wage Act.
There’s no talk about increasing pension provision in the private sector, so that we all have decent pensions. No, the public sector workers have to be dragged down into poverty in their old age as well as the rest of us.
There are some in the private and the public sectors who continue to have excellent pensions. Someone should investigate the pension and healthcare benefits that Wisconsin state legislatures (is it a “citizens’ legislature”?) make. And the per diem. And don’t get me started about the upper ranks of the private sector.
When Jeb Bush left the governorship in FLA he worked selling the Lehman Brothers crap to state and local pension programs, thus ensuring their bankruptcy. Now he’s going around giving advice on how pension plans need to be cut back. What a guy!
He’s the personification of the problem. There’s nothing wrong with working at a job because you get a decent pension after thirty or forty years. But now that the Repubs and Wall Street have looted the pensions they want to change the rules.
When union membership was over 30% of the workforce, in the fifties and the sixties, everyone did better. But now the hungry mega-billionaires are running out of places to steal from. So public sector workers, because the state hires women and minorities, is now just another scapegoat along with illegals and any other group they can use to divert attention.