Wisconsin Gov. Walker Threatens To Deploy National Guard Against Unions

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Ah yes, I read that Fox Nation speculated whether the judge was being smeared. As far as I know he never challenged that he grabbed her by the neck. But lest we get distracted, it is, it must be, clearly, a public sectors union smear campaign. What else?

 

How funny is that next to the thread on the Prop 8 judge?

Did they forge enough signatures for that?

Experiments in union busting are nothing new.

Not with Walker. It was before he got there, but I doubt it will stay that way with Republicans in charge.

Their goal is to wreck the public schools and keep people ignorant. Wisconsin was once proud of its school system. We'll see what's left of it.

 

I would like to point out that William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court after serving as President. So a judge who was formerly a politician is in no way unprecedented.

 

...Oooops. They came up short on the "invalid" sigs:

Here's the latest on the recalls:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...in-recall-fight/2011/03/03/AGe9HynH_blog.html

And I bet y'all thought I was kidding about those phony sigs.

 

Aldeth,
point taken.

 

Actually the ethical/moral standards of some of those working for the GOP has been brought into question already with the felon I mentioned earlier who was working for the state GOP.

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com...drops-recall-worker-cited-Lambeau-Field-theft

Now there were allegations that a number of the signatures gathered by the GOP against Democratic state senators were done by dishonesty-I'll see if I have a link somewhere but there were reports that people were lying to American Indians on a reservation telling them that their signature was to support Democrats or some such thing-not to recall one.

I'd like an article from a more mainstream news source rather than a political party but here is a reference to what I was talking about.

http://www.winnebagodems.org/2011/05/gop-election-fraud-exposed.html

 

I hope this guy isn't telling falsehoods. It would be nice to know that it is working

Spoiler

"This is a disaster," Mark Miller, the Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader, said in February after Republican Gov. Scott Walker proposed a budget bill that would curtail the collective-bargaining powers of some public employees. Miller predicted catastrophe if the bill were to become law - a charge repeated thousands of times by his fellow Democrats, union officials and protesters in the streets.

Now the bill is law, and we have some early evidence of how it is working. And for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it's a godsend, not a disaster.

The Kaukauna Area School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect at 12:01 a.m. June 29, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it's all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.

In the past, teachers and other staff at Kaukauna were required to pay 10 percent of the cost of their health-insurance coverage and none of their pension costs. Now they'll pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their coverage (still well below rates in much of the private sector) and contribute 5.8 percent of salary to their pensions. The changes will save the school board an estimated $1.2 million this year, according to board president Todd Arnoldussen.

Of course, Wisconsin unions had offered to make benefit concessions during the budget fight. Wouldn't Kaukauna's money problems have been solved if Walker had just accepted those concessions and not demanded cutbacks in collective-bargaining powers?

"The monetary part of it is not the entire issue," says Arnoldussen, a political independent who won a spot on the board in a nonpartisan election. Indeed, some of the most important improvements in Kaukauna's outlook are because of the new limits on collective bargaining.

In the past, Kaukauna's agreement with the teachers union required the school district to purchase health-insurance coverage from something called WEA Trust - a company created by the Wisconsin teachers union. "It was in the collective-bargaining agreement that we could negotiate only with them," says Arnoldussen. "Well, you know what happens when you can negotiate with only one vendor." This year, WEA Trust told Kaukauna that it would face a significant increase in premiums.

Now the collective-bargaining agreement is gone, and the school district is free to shop around for coverage. And all of a sudden, WEA Trust has changed its position. "With these changes, the schools could go out for bids, and, lo and behold, WEA Trust said, 'We can match the lowest bid,"' says Republican state Rep. Jim Steineke, who represents the area and supports the Walker changes. At least for the moment, Kaukauna is staying with WEA Trust but saving substantial amounts of money.

Then there are work rules. "In the collective-bargaining agreement, high school teachers had to teach only five periods a day out of seven," says Arnoldussen. "Now they're going to teach six." In addition, the collective-bargaining agreement specified that teachers had to be in the school 37- 1/2 hours a week. Now it will be 40 hours.

The changes mean Kaukauna can reduce the size of its classes - from 31 students to 26 students in high school and from 26 students to 23 students in elementary school. In addition, there will be more teacher time for one-on-one sessions with troubled students. Those changes would not have been possible without the much-maligned changes in collective bargaining.

Teachers' salaries will stay "relatively the same," Arnoldussen says, except for higher pension and health care payments. (The top salary is about $80,000 per year, with about $35,000 in additional benefits, for 184 days of work per year - summers off.) Finally, the money saved will be used to hire a few more teachers and institute merit pay.

It is impossible to overstate how bitter and ugly the Wisconsin fight has been, and that bitterness and ugliness continues to this day with efforts to recall senators and an unseemly battle inside the state Supreme Court. But the new law is now a reality, and Gov. Walker recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the measure would gain acceptance "with every day, week and month that goes by that the world doesn't fall apart."

In the Kaukauna schools, the world is definitely not falling apart - it's getting better.

Byron York is chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner.


Read more: http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/a...roversial-law-begins-to-pay-off#ixzz1S0HPPe2N

 

Of course it saves money? Wasn't that the entire point? I am not so sure it pulls people into teaching or make people stay in teaching. Never ceases to amaze the vehemence so many people feel against teachers and the so widespread opinion that we are just sitting on our asses all day doing nothing. Might as well lock us up in school when the students leave or just hire some bum off the street cause it obviously doesnt matter what kind of work we do as just as we have our butts inside the school. Same thing everywhere and it just makes me sad and tired.

 

Hello joacqin, I personally have nothing but respect for teachers(one of my sisters is a teacher ), what a lot of people have problems with is the unions. A lot of the states have let them get out of hand. I know teachers here work way harder than the ones talked about in the article. T(my sis) gets to work at 7:30 & doesn't leave till 4:30, she is always doing stuff at home & the weekends for school.
The thing that people complain about are the thugs in the unions, like in the article above, where the teachers union created the insurance company then made it so the school HAD to contract with them for insurance.
Look at all the stuff going on with the teachers being charged in the cheating scandals in georgia(like 150 or more at last count) & several other states.
People only seem to hear about the bad teachers & never about the good ones.

 

Unfortunately, yes - scandals are more newsworthy than cases of honest people doing good work. You don't hear much about the good teachers (unless it's someone's pet project, which often turns to have been... exaggerated about), just as you don't hear all that much about good cops, good social workers, good catholic priests, good civil servants, and so on. Scandal and outrage sell better, I guess exactly because they are unusual, exotic, not something you can see every day at your job or in the bar. And that's even before you get politics into this. Politics is an identity game, and the better defined the "Us" and the opponent "Them" are, the better. Small differences get blown way out of proportion, and the more it goes on, the more the people involved start to roleplay it - and to believe it. When that happens on both sides, it becomes hard to differentiate the masks from reality.

Actually, I'd say unions have the same issue. Now, I don't know how it is in the States, but here most members I've heard of are decent people working well at their job and having enough political interest to want to make sure they are not screwed over. I find this only natural - after all, people are supposed to take care of their interests, and there is power in numbers. I imagine even the people in leadership are generally decent, honest people. They may be wrong on some issues, right on others. However, you don't hear about those. You hear about the people who've messed up - then it becomes newsworthy. And that, too, is even before you get politics into this.

 

What Georgia suggests is that there are inherent vulnerabilities in a performance driven pay, measured by metrics like (sales or) notes, for teachers or school execs.

In my old job our company had salesmen selling credit cards in the UK, and, with them being abroad, we had little checks on them initially. Since they were payed to do sales (i.e. performance driven pay), they generated sales. Some resorted to fraud and generated fictitious sales, and 'gamed the system'.

The Georgia scandal is about the same incentives, the same logic and the same gaming the system. Good marks got that exec a better pay, under the premise that good marks per se indicate good quality of teaching. So she produced good marks.

 

I gained a lot of respect for teachers after I married one. I used to think like a lot of other people do - they get the summers off and they don't even work a 40-hour week. I still think that, but now I'm on the other side of that fence - they work way more than a 40-hour week, just not all of those 40 hours are put in at the school. When you add up the time they spend prepping lesson plans, doing quarterly grades, and actually grading tests and papers on nights and weekends, any teacher worth their salt puts in considerably MORE than 40 hours of work in a typical week. Most schools do give teachers one free period per day, but that typically is insufficient to get all your grading and other work done.

 

Unions are necessary. Employers are also necessary. The thing is, both must negotiate in good faith and with the end goal of finding acceptable, logical, reasonable, fair, feasible, and realistic compromises in terms of compensation, benefits, and workplace environment.

What I am seeing sometimes is bargainers who just don't have that good faith attitude. They need to be reigned in.

 

That is why public service unions shouldn't be allowed. I believe it was FDR who said he was willing to negotiate with Stalin and not public service unions. The problem with them is that it becomes an endless circle. The Democratic party relies on the unions for money and votes to keep in office. The only way they can guarantee the unions continued support is to continually give them what they want, regardless if it is in the best interest of the taxpayers. After the Democrats being in the pocket of big labor for decades all (and I mean all) of our local and state governments are in dire financial straits. The unions have been promised benefits that can't possibly be funded. That is why I'm so impressed with what Walker has done in Wisconsin. I keep waiting to see if and when a Democrat will be brave and bold enough to do the same.

 

It's not just democrats The Great Snook, a good number of republicans are or have been in bed with the unions too.

 

TGS - Somehow I knew your dislike of the unions was really "all about" the Democrats. You never let me down.

 

I think you are probably overestimating the number of Republicans with public service union support.

Look at numbers 2,5, and 10

Can you find on that list a public service union that even gives 30% to the GOP?

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Well, when unions= Democrats it is hard to differentiate between the two. Although, I have to point out that Democrats do not equal unions, so you really aren't correct in your assessment.

 

So... a lobbying group gives money and votes democratic in order to attain policy goals. Could you tell me what's so special about this that requires the said lobbying group to be banned? I'm quite certain that there are several lobbying groups doing the same for republicans as well. The right for labor to unionize is in my opinion one of the basic rights of a democratic society and restrictions therein constitute severe limitations to basic liberties. I would hazard a guess that such bans would be unconstitutional as well. Or at least I hope they would.

 

Well, at least banning unions from exercising their influence is one of the things the US is as piously as routinely chastising other governments for.

That's not hypocrisy. They are just impervious to the idea (read: fact) that there is anything in the US that is not perfect and exemplary.

 

In Finland the public sector unions are typically the weakest unions around easily bullied by local and central government for way lower pay than the private sector. It's nearly unheard of that a public sector worker would earn more than their counterparts in the private sector.

But then the labormarket dynamics in Finland are very different to that of the US. In Finland over 80% of workers are unionized and wages are nearly always based on a collective contract between the employer organisations and unions. Modifications can obviously be made on individual basis and that has more and more become the trend but the collective contract usually sets the minimum standards.