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Tea & Cheese Party
I'm finding Wisconsin to be a fascinating event right now. After a couple of years of rallies dominated by the far right, with heavily armed whites lapping up rhetoric about death panels and the socialist takeover of the United States, it's intriguing to watch organized labour actually seize the narrative for once and push back hard against what isn't even thinly disguised union busting.
A little profile for those not currently watching from home. The new governor of Wisconsin, Tea Party darling Scott Walker, has decided to address the upcoming deficit in the state's budget through fairly severe cuts to services and by leveraging a greater percentage of pension and health care costs for public employees back on to them. Also in his bill is a provision that removes the right of collective bargaining and the ability to strike from public employees.
The plan cuts pension and health care benefits for current public workers, and restricts new wage increases unless approved by a voter referendum. Contracts would be limited to one year, with wages frozen until a new contract is settled. In addition, Walker's plan also changes rules to require collective bargaining units to take annual votes to maintain certification as a union, stops employers from collecting union dues, and allows members of collective bargaining units to avoid paying dues. Law enforcement, fire employees and state troopers and inspectors would be exempt from the changes.
In short, it strips away pretty much any power that public sector workers have to negotiate with the state, and to effectively organize. The justifications for the necessity for these measures have been flying fast and furious from Madison, and have flown with all the success of a lead balloon. Walker's call for austerity comes on the back of an estimated $200M tax cut which will add to the 2011-2013 budget shortfall. Further, his demands for shared fiscal sacrifice have been accepted by the union, making the measures to curtail collective bargaining rights superfluous to his main argument. Next was an attempt to paint Wisconsin public workers as overpaid, swiftly debunked by showing that on average, they made about 80% of what their private sector counterparts make. There was the threat to call out the National Guard, which had some fairly stern warnings from local officials, as well as a viral comparison to uprisings in Africa and the Middle East. Finally, the anti-union heavyweights Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity announced the investment of millions in advertising to support Walker's agenda. Koch Industries has substantial infrastructure in Wisconsin, and one of their lobbying groups - the American Legislative Exchange Council - has been a key figure in dismantling Wisconsin's environmental regulations to be more favourable for pollution heavy businesses such as Koch Industry owned coal plants in Green Bay, Ashland, Sheboygan and Manitowoc, six pulp and paper mills and a statewide pipeline network.
In response to this, the state capitol building has been pretty much under seige with protests for days now, with at least twenty thousand protesting. State Senate Democrats have fled the state in order to deny the House a quorum in order to vote through the bill, and while Walker is refusing any shift or negotiation in his position, similar protests have broken out in Ohio and Indiana over other overt attempts to remove collective bargaining rights. What is fascinating is the broad spectrum support, especially at a time when union membership is at its lowest point in the last 80 years in the US, and reported public opinion in general has remained at sustained anti-union support.
There's a chart making the rounds these days looking at the distribution of wealth in the US, and what Americans believe it is, and what Americans describe as an ideal, and the disconnect between the ideal and the reality is striking.
The interesting thing is that the narrative on fiscal responsibility has been dominated by the policies that reinforce wealth inequities; lower corporate taxes, lower tax rates on higher incomes, outsourcing of public services to non-union private sector companies, right to work legislation. Everything touted as a cost control in today's market fails to look at modern corporate monetary practice, and shows a dangerous naivety about the underpinnings of the American free market economy. The worst is the overall loss of equity in the US, disproportionately affecting the middle class, and strangling the credit market.
With Wisconsin and now to a lesser degree Ohio and Indiana pushing on a pro-union message (something that hasn't been seen since the late 70s), it will be interesting to see if this provides the same kind of transformative moment on the left as Obama's election did on the right; where the Tea Partiers saw the rise of socialism, the unions are looking at open movements to regress worker's rights to turn of the century levels.
EDIT: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-labor-union-decline?page=1#
A little profile for those not currently watching from home. The new governor of Wisconsin, Tea Party darling Scott Walker, has decided to address the upcoming deficit in the state's budget through fairly severe cuts to services and by leveraging a greater percentage of pension and health care costs for public employees back on to them. Also in his bill is a provision that removes the right of collective bargaining and the ability to strike from public employees.
The plan cuts pension and health care benefits for current public workers, and restricts new wage increases unless approved by a voter referendum. Contracts would be limited to one year, with wages frozen until a new contract is settled. In addition, Walker's plan also changes rules to require collective bargaining units to take annual votes to maintain certification as a union, stops employers from collecting union dues, and allows members of collective bargaining units to avoid paying dues. Law enforcement, fire employees and state troopers and inspectors would be exempt from the changes.
In short, it strips away pretty much any power that public sector workers have to negotiate with the state, and to effectively organize. The justifications for the necessity for these measures have been flying fast and furious from Madison, and have flown with all the success of a lead balloon. Walker's call for austerity comes on the back of an estimated $200M tax cut which will add to the 2011-2013 budget shortfall. Further, his demands for shared fiscal sacrifice have been accepted by the union, making the measures to curtail collective bargaining rights superfluous to his main argument. Next was an attempt to paint Wisconsin public workers as overpaid, swiftly debunked by showing that on average, they made about 80% of what their private sector counterparts make. There was the threat to call out the National Guard, which had some fairly stern warnings from local officials, as well as a viral comparison to uprisings in Africa and the Middle East. Finally, the anti-union heavyweights Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity announced the investment of millions in advertising to support Walker's agenda. Koch Industries has substantial infrastructure in Wisconsin, and one of their lobbying groups - the American Legislative Exchange Council - has been a key figure in dismantling Wisconsin's environmental regulations to be more favourable for pollution heavy businesses such as Koch Industry owned coal plants in Green Bay, Ashland, Sheboygan and Manitowoc, six pulp and paper mills and a statewide pipeline network.
In response to this, the state capitol building has been pretty much under seige with protests for days now, with at least twenty thousand protesting. State Senate Democrats have fled the state in order to deny the House a quorum in order to vote through the bill, and while Walker is refusing any shift or negotiation in his position, similar protests have broken out in Ohio and Indiana over other overt attempts to remove collective bargaining rights. What is fascinating is the broad spectrum support, especially at a time when union membership is at its lowest point in the last 80 years in the US, and reported public opinion in general has remained at sustained anti-union support.
There's a chart making the rounds these days looking at the distribution of wealth in the US, and what Americans believe it is, and what Americans describe as an ideal, and the disconnect between the ideal and the reality is striking.
The interesting thing is that the narrative on fiscal responsibility has been dominated by the policies that reinforce wealth inequities; lower corporate taxes, lower tax rates on higher incomes, outsourcing of public services to non-union private sector companies, right to work legislation. Everything touted as a cost control in today's market fails to look at modern corporate monetary practice, and shows a dangerous naivety about the underpinnings of the American free market economy. The worst is the overall loss of equity in the US, disproportionately affecting the middle class, and strangling the credit market.
With Wisconsin and now to a lesser degree Ohio and Indiana pushing on a pro-union message (something that hasn't been seen since the late 70s), it will be interesting to see if this provides the same kind of transformative moment on the left as Obama's election did on the right; where the Tea Partiers saw the rise of socialism, the unions are looking at open movements to regress worker's rights to turn of the century levels.
EDIT: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-labor-union-decline?page=1#
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Just as an aside.
South Carolina - 50th
North Carolina - 49th
Georgia - 48th
Texas - 47th
Virginia - 44th
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It was at that point that I realised, no matter how much US culture Australia imports, there are chasms between our ways of thinking of the world that are unbridgeable. Not all Americans think this way, of course, but that they can think that at all baffles me. I also liked the constant cry of "my job in the private sector sucks and I get no benefits, so the public sector should be dragged down to my level!". Not, maybe, the private sector should be made to improve their working conditions...
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Having been a public servant without a union (we had the Clerk of Courts Group, which had all the bargaining power of a soggy cucumber sandwich), and having been royally screwed because of it (crappy wages, increasing amounts of work, dangerous workplaces with a lack of security, tape recording cases being dumped on us without any kind of consultation), I was overjoyed when we finally said "enough is enough" and joined the Federal public servants union. We promptly got cost of living increases and representation in the enterprise bargaining agreements that meant we had actual security and you know, things like vacation time.
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That's why the stereotypes of the welfare queen and the lazy union worker are so pervasive in American society. The idea of such people is especially outrageous to someone who never needed social help, or someone who feels he's never benefited from social help.
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PROS:
*Thanks to the mandatory ethics courses, our members are more likely to be the good kind of brokers and not the shady kind that people always complain about.
CONS:
*The board doesn't accurately speak for me when it comes to supporting certain kinds of bills and state measures.
*Every time our board president asks us to support another measure which helps rich people escape new taxes, it makes me want to create a sub-committee of board members who doesn't want to support those measures.
*Also, considering I'm perhaps the only salaried broker-assistants in our office, I'd like to also be a part of a committee which speaks to my concerns, but such a thing doesn't exist at the board level.
In other words, I totally empathize with the moderates in Wisconsin who didn't want any of this to happen but are powerless to stop it because their union leaders' voices are stronger and more powerful than theirs.