Wisconsin’s Governor Walker is losing the public-relations battle to the public-employee unions whose power he is challenging. Whenever I see this issue discussed on the news, people on Walker’s side are quoted saying the state has to cut costs or it will go broke, while people on the unions’ side say they are willing to make salary and pension concessions, they just don’t want to lose the right to collective bargaining. To the average American, Walker is a meanie trying to deny downtrodden public employees their rights.
There is a very good reason why public employees should not have the right to collective bargaining. In the private sector, companies may consist of thousands of stockholders and thousands of workers. It is obviously impossible for each stockholder to bargain with each worker. The stockholders hire managers to represent their interests, so it seems only fair that workers have unions to represent their interests. Both sides can bargain effectively based on their conflicting interest (each wants as big a share of the revenues as possible) and shared interest (each wants the company to continue).
This symmetry doesn’t exist in the public sector. On one side are the taxpayers whose money pays public employees, while on the other side are the employees. But elected or appointed officials who would bargain on behalf of the state don’t represent taxpayers; they represent voters. And if a large segment of those voters are public employees, and if their unions make large contributions to political campaigns, then the state officials are likely to make concessions that taxpayers won’t want or can’t afford to pay.
The issue in Wisconsin (and many other states) is not pay but unfunded pension and health-care liabilities. Here there is a double asymmetry: given a choice between making future taxpayers (who don’t vote) pay higher costs or facing resistance from current public employees (who do vote), officials are likely to agree to union demands for unaffordable health care and pensions.
Potential Treatments to Reverse ED If you suffer viagra 50 mg check out for more from allergies, anemia, vision problem , cancer, high blood pressure or high cholesterol. Increased cholesterol gets accumulated on walls buy sildenafil canada of arteries as hard plaques. Eliminating the aggravation alone is worth the hard earned money and a viagra rx lifetime achievement of dreams. Since then to now, the medication has been successful for achieving endless fame and millions of satisfactory viagra 100mg mastercard users universally. This is the argument Walker should be, and probably is, making, but it isn’t getting heard on television because it is hard to reduce it to a 30-second sound bite. Walker’s goal is to end collective bargaining for pension and health care but continue to let workers collectively bargain for salaries and wages.
It isn’t clear to the Antiplanner why Walker thinks he can deal with the asymmetry of bargaining over pay but not the asymmetry of bargaining over health care and pensions. In comparison to that great fiscal conservative, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Walker is selling out the taxpayers.
In 1937, Roosevelt was invited to speak to the National Federation of Federal Employees. He not only refused to do so, he wrote to them that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” He added “that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees.” Members of the Wisconsin teachers’ unions would obviously never vote for him!
Still, Walker has to know that even if he wins his battle to end collective bargaining for pensions and health care this year, some day the Democrats will retake the Wisconsin legislature and restore such bargaining. In focusing on collective bargaining rather than the actual terms of employment, Walker allowed the unions to take control of the debate, making it an issue of “rights” instead of finances. Walker should have instead settled for negotiating more reasonable (and fully funded) pensions and health-care plans.
Recent history shows that, when either party retakes control of a legislative body, they usually go overboard in trying to impose their views of how government should work on the world. Whether they succeed or fail, doing so simply leads to a huge backlash that only guarantees that the other party will regain control sooner. Party leaders need to think strategically and find ways to solve problems that are less polarizing. Walker, unfortunately, failed to do so.
Antiplanner:
Gov. Walker is focused on collective bargaining because the WEA is using that power to force the selection of WEA Trust as the health insurer for teachers. The reason health care costs are so high is that the WEA Trust is the most expensive option. Health care costs can’t be reformed without getting rid of the WEA Trust or at least forcing it to meet the competitive pricing of the marketplace. Further, WEA Trust refuses to provide health insurance records to even permit other companies to create a competitive bid for a school district.
Of course the union is willing to make its members suffer a bit by paying coinsurance. As long as they retain the ultimate power of being the insurer, this concession is meaningless. Because their rates are so high, they could probably even make up the concession to membership in salary negotiations or in adjusting overall premium rates. The key to the union is to retain WEA Trust a source of additional funds for the political power of the WEA. Where do you suppose all those high premiums are going to?
I’m surprised you haven’t researched this issue fully to understand this is the crux of the matter. Gov. Walker has stated this is precisely the reason collective bargaining must be eliminated.
I had my secondary level education in Wisconsin back in the 80’s and 90’s. It is appalling how far achievement has fallen in that time in Wisconsin as the WEA has completed its stranglehold on the schools. Gov. Walker’s budget detailed some of the problems – statewide 4th grade reading levels have fallen from top 5 to close to bottom 10; reading levels among blacks in Milwaukee are the lowest in the country; etc. Wisconsin public schools right now are living on a legacy of what they did 20+ years ago that has no relationship to current reality.
The Gov. detailed what the union teachers have “achieved” in the last 16 years in Wisconsin in his first budget. It was splashed all over the Wisconsin media yesterday and certainly was powerful ammunition for what needs to be done.
Andrew, the fake Faux news clip, the covert shipping in of audience members to clap madly, the conversation with the billionaire benefactor, the lying about reasons, the avoiding of topics in speeches…these are all clues.
This is not to say that reforms are unnecessary. This is to say the lying Noise Machine is lying. And falling achievement is happening all over. Wisco is not the sole recipient of ADD-style education reform.
DS
Another reason for going after bargaining is that in Wisconsin it can take as much as 18 months to reach an agreement with a union, which means there would be no economic changes made for that period of time. As for faux crowds, the capital building is full of pro-labor demonstrators shipped in from other states and paid for by the Obama administration’s political organization. As for the make-up of the audience during his speech, it is true that the people in the audience were largely Republicans. The Democrats, as you should know, chose to watch the speech on TV, from Illinois.
the capital building is full of pro-labor demonstrators shipped in from other states and paid for by the Obama administration’s political organization.
Like I said: the lying Noise Machine is lying.
Did you hear the right-wing union-busters in Ohio had to kick off two pro-union Repubs to get a yes vote? The lengths the plutocrats are going to in order to completely consolidate power…
DS
“The lengths the plutocrats are going to in order to completely consolidate power”
How is eliminating government employee unionization got anything do with plutocrats in private sector capitalistic enterprises?
Surely you are not implying that elected officials and senior government executives are plutocrats, are you?
Of the top ten campaign funders, seven are to Repubs. The biggest one for Dems is unions. Eliminate unions and you’ve eliminated 33% of Dem’s top ten funders. In the post-Citizens United world, that’s big.
But, look: everyone knows what’s going on here. Even the Repubs polling outfit can’t hide it.
DS
“The issue in Wisconsin (and many other states) is not pay but unfunded pension and health-care liabilities.”
While pension and health-care costs might be a greater issue, pay is still a significant issue. Again, the average public school teacher makes $10,000 more per year than the average non-public school teacher. Multiply that by the number of teachers in Wisconsin and you get $600 million. That’s a rough amount over market rate that the WEA/NEA has coerced from taxpayers for teacher salaries. The fact is that non-public schools achieve better results for less money.
#6 is a reason to end the NEA. If private unions want to donate to Democrats, fine. But the NEA is funding Democrats with taxpayer money taken forcibly and without express permission from teachers’ salaries. That is wrong.
“Surely you are not implying , are you?”
I spent the day out at the TX capital yesterday. The legislature is in session and it was may first time wondering the halls in that situation. Just by my unofficial count there are probably 10 lobbyist for every member of the TX congress. Even if the intentions are to do good initially, there is no doubt in my mind that the majority of TX legislators have been turned to the plutocratic agenda. I wouldn’t imply “that elected officials and senior government executives are plutocrats,” I’ll flat out say it. Legislation is bought by those who have the ability to pay. If that ain’t a plutocracy I don’t know what is.
p.s. I’m assuming WI operates in a similar way, and we know how things work in D.C.
Dan:
“Of the top ten campaign funders, seven are to Repubs. The biggest one for Dems is unions. Eliminate unions and you’ve eliminated 33% of Dem’s top ten funders.”
Boo hoo. Maybe the Democrats will have to change the type of policies they advocate to appeal to more people with money if this really puts them in desperate financial straits. They seem to have no problem appealing to the upper middle class. It is wrong to subject a man to the forced payment of money to an organization that can then use that money against his own political beliefs. Would you support unions being able to take member money, especially public unions 100% funded by tax dollars, and allow them to hand it over to various religious groups to propogate religion?
This is the same problem that was created by the Reynolds vs. Sims decision. In days of yore, the State Senate in many states was allocated by one Senator per county (i.e. 67 counties in California – 67 Senators; 62 counties in New York – 62 Senators), and State Representatives were apportioned among the counties, just like is done on the Federal level. For a party to win control of a state, it had to present policies that would appeal to voters across a majority of the counties of the state and also across a majority of the inhabitants. Reynolds vs. Sims abolished this and concentrated local political power into urbanized districts where th emost people live, ending the need to appeal in a campaign to both urban and rural interests. Now people are shocked by the red-blue dichotomy of US electoral geography as the parties have realigned themselves to suit their narrow and parochial interest groups.
The present uncivil, viciously partisan, and divided atmosphere in American politics is a direct result of this.
bennett:
“I’ll flat out say it. Legislation is bought by those who have the ability to pay.”
If the people don’t like this, it is incumbent on them to throw the rascals out at the voting booth and elect men of integrity who will not be swayed by special interests.
Plutocrats are a very small minority of the US population. They couldn’t possibly get their agenda passed without convincing a majority of the people to repeatedly elect politicans who support it. Votes are not proportional to dollars of wealth.
Lastly, it can easily be shown that money is not the cause of winning and losing elections, because there are plenty of winners every year who are outspent by their opponents by wide margins. The direct cause of winning elections is generally the partisan voter background of those who are motivated to register and vote, which is founded on the attractiveness of the candidate and their positions.
If private unions want to donate to Democrats, fine. But the NEA is funding Democrats with taxpayer money taken forcibly and without express permission from teachers’ salaries. That is wrong.
If those evil teachers edumacatin’ the kids are such a menace, it should be easy for the right-wingers to make their case to the people. Instead, the wingers broadcast lies on the Noise Machine, they bus in suits on taxpayer dollars to lie about the composition of the audience, the lying about the agenda to to people, and so on. That is wrong.
DS
The Antiplanner wrote:
There is a very good reason why public employees should not have the right to collective bargaining. In the private sector, companies may consist of thousands of stockholders and thousands of workers. It is obviously impossible for each stockholder to bargain with each worker. The stockholders hire managers to represent their interests, so it seems only fair that workers have unions to represent their interests. Both sides can bargain effectively based on their conflicting interest (each wants as big a share of the revenues as possible) and shared interest (each wants the company to continue).
This symmetry doesn’t exist in the public sector. On one side are the taxpayers whose money pays public employees, while on the other side are the employees. But elected or appointed officials who would bargain on behalf of the state don’t represent taxpayers; they represent voters. And if a large segment of those voters are public employees, and if their unions make large contributions to political campaigns, then the state officials are likely to make concessions that taxpayers won’t want or can’t afford to pay.
I am not a fan of the current governor of Wisconsin. Having said that, I must agree with what the Antiplanner has written above.
Far too many unions representing public employees have made demands (which the elected officials on the other side of the table have gone along with) that were clearly excessive.
Have I stated that teachers are “evil” or a “menace”? Has the opposition to the NEA used such wording? If so, please provide an example. If not, you’re distorting.
Come on Frank, you’re not that stupid.
Did you some how think that, Randal O’Toole’s Koch sponsored attacks on public transit are not done in the financial interests of Koch?
Koch doesn’t want people spending less money on oil!
Poor Frank. Casting about, flailing away, desperate for play.
Let’s try this to take away any hand-flapping:
If the well-to-do teachers driving new Volvos are so powerful, obdurate and harmful, it should be easy for the right-wingers to make their case to the people. Instead, the wingers broadcast lies on the Noise Machine, they bus in suits on taxpayer dollars to lie about the composition of the audience, the lying about the agenda to to people, and so on. That is wrong.
HTH.
DS
…and if you actually for some reason believe this clown collection is actually serious about fiscal discipline and “balancing the budget”, then your head will explode when you realize this clown collection – every single one – voted to extend funding for the Bridge to Nowhere. Seriously.
They are The Wrecking Crew. That is their plan.
DS
Hey Dan, I saw someone jerking off to a light rail train today, and I was just wondering if that was you. If you are having mental problems, there is help, you know.
Gov Walker got things in the wrong order in this case. He should have gone after the unions first and discussed the business goodies second. This is typical stupidity of a young delusional governor and will cost him dearly.
Dan should seek treatment for paranoid personality disorder, as he his displaying the following symptoms (as outlined on Wiki):
tendency to bear grudges persistently
suspiciousness and a pervasive tendency to distort experience by misconstruing the neutral or friendly actions of others as hostile or contemptuous;
tendency to experience excessive self-importance, manifest in a persistent self-referential attitude
preoccupation with unsubstantiated “conspiratorial” explanations of events both immediate to the patient and in the world at large
Dan can’t handle being called on his sh!t. Distortions and mischaracterizations, red herrings, appeals to ridicule, ad hominems. He gets his panties in a bunch and accuses anyone who calls him out of wanting to “have play” or of “hand-flapping”. Find a thesaurus already. Seek help.
Hey Danny Boy! Please tell us when and why the Wisconsin legislature was voting on the “Bridge to Nowhere”. If you revise your rambling statement to somehow mean the Congress, how did the 99 new Republicans in Congress this year vote on something in Congress in 2006?
Dan is really struggling with his writing since Keith Olbermann was fired.
Though Keith Olbermann is still working for Comcast, but now Current TV instead of NBC.
Perhaps Dan would not be so snide if he had a direct connection to Wisconsin and actually, um, KNEW what was going on there.
Being that Wisconsin is my home state, and being that most of my close friends and relatives live there (several are teachers)I am privy to the excitement at the capitol.
The situation is more complex than just “power grabs” and “Noise Machines” and “Koch Money.” For chrissakes, my sister-in-law is a rural Wisconsin schoolteacher who is vehemently anti-Walker, and even she doesn’t resort to dumb buzzwords and easy characterizations of the opposition, despite being angry as hell.
And she doesn’t frame the whole dispute in hyper-simplistic “power consolidation” terms. In fact, her direct quote to me Friday night was that “it’s not a Republican vs. Democrat issue.” The recurring theme in her comments was that this dispute is about Walker’s ego, which apparently supersedes partisan politics.
Dan is qualified to speak on behalf of urban gardening and bike paths, but he is not qualified to weigh in on this issue. He is stubbornly anchored to the same harmonic interpretation of the same old song.
Here Dan, read more than Michael Moore’s HuffPo transcript:
http://lat.ms/h6W2uR
Walker is tanking in the polls. He overreached. He did not run on eliminating collective bargaining, but rammed such a bill down their throats to vote on in a week. He sucked up to who he thought was a billionaire. He is lying by omission in his speeches. He just lied about striking a deal with Dems. Even Faux says it isn’t about balancing the budget. He is reduced to projection about secret phone calls. He is in over his head. Probably too deep to recover.
Cheap sockpuppets cannot hand-flap away from these basic facts and the others I provided upthread.
DS
Basic facts aside, the NEA is the largest special interest group in the country. It is coercive and deceptive. It is too big not to fail. This is no longer about Walker.
Speaking if secret phone calls, did you hear about the secret video that shows the highest of the high in NPR are in fact biased toward the left? Poor, poor Sesame Street. Speaking of bias, according to NBC, this could mean that Grover is getting the axe. Sad for all those midwestern kids like me who grew up without accents thanks to Sesame Street. Maybe PBS’s rich patrons will step in to fill the 15% of the budget that’s provided by the fed’r’l gubment to keep dem po’ kid edumacated.
The racist Jew-hating NPR executive who “quit” NPR to go to the highly liberal Aspen Institute just got fired from the Aspen Institute because even they could not stomach the NPR corporate ethics.
Hey, I like NPR and think they work very hard to appear to be non-biased. They clearly work very very hard at being non-biased because their entire workforce is so diverse between the left-wing, far left-wing, and raging Jew-hating Muslim Brotherhood. How clueless can a liberal news organization be that it doesn’t notice it is firing its only black employee because he went on the cable station that Dan watches night and day? Fortunately the NY Times didn’t find any of that fit to print, so none of the broad minded NPR donors ever heard of that.
I for one don’t want NPR to lose their government funding. Big Bird makes $1 billion a year and still gets government welfare, and there is no better symbol of government planning than that for the kiddies.
Surely Murdoch comes under the same incisive scrutiny and harrumphing, predictable fake outrage – his massive tax breaks surely cost patriotic Merkans much, much more than entertainment for some Birkie-wearing teachers and effete gallery-going urban intellectuals.
DS
Disclaimer: I don’t watch Fox News nor am I a fan of it or Murdoch.
However, the statism in #28 is palpable. The commenter mistakes expenditure of taxes for tax revenue. The premise: Your money is not your own, and by using legally avoiding giving us your money, you are costing us our money.
Welcome to Amerika, comrade, where your money is our money, profit is a dirty word, and if you do profit, we’ll take it, unless you’re a non-profit, then you can make it and propagate liberal propaganda tax exempt with a help from the taxpayers.
Whatever boy. Misstate what I wrote to your heart’s content to have something to say. Who am I to take away all you have?
There’s a statist under your bed! Boo!
chuckle
And lads, the messiah Glenn Beck has examined your oh-so-important tapes and finds that – who would have guessed?!?!? – they’ve been edited to make NPR look bad. Just like all the other lying times liars have lied about catching someone in the act of saying something.
DS
Stop with the personal insults. I know where you live.
Hey Danny Boy, listen to your NPR Board Member. Why are you supporting decades of subsidies solely going to the wealthiest 11%?
What happened as a result is that we unwittingly cultivated a core audience that is predominately white, liberal, highly educated, elite. “Super-serve the core” — that was the mantra, for many, many years. This focus has, in large part, brought us to our success today. It was never anyone’s intention to exclude anyone.
One choice, at this transformational moment, is to say, “We are satisfied with what we are doing. We — in radio — are providing 11 percent of America with an extraordinary service.” If this is our choice, we need to carefully consider whether we warrant public funding and, if so, what the rationale would be.
http://www.current.org/audience/aud1105schardt.html
Frank, if you aren’t capable of comprehending that people who dully parrot ‘statist’ – while miscaracterizing the argument – (while transparently trying to depersonalize the reply) have nothing, then there’s no hope for you. And your low-quality threat gives you away. Man up.
We can see, folks, that there really is no defense for the arguments used here to defend poor Walker. He was dishonest. There is no hiding it.
DS
Walker’s objective is to screw WI.
“. Big Bird makes $1 billion a year and still gets government welfare, and there is no better symbol of government planning than that for the kiddies.” – Andy
Thanks Andy. I enjoyed that comment.
“This is the argument Walker should be, and probably is, making, but it isn’t getting heard on television because it is hard to reduce it to a 30-second sound bite. Walker’s goal is to end collective bargaining for pension and health care but continue to let workers collectively bargain for salaries and wages.” -The Antiplanner
Maybe it’s just me but the message is out there. it’s not as much since it requires some reporting skills beyond pointing a camera at a group of people making noise or showing up to a news conference.
What is very difficult to find is information on the exact details of this sort of thing. If this is simply part of a bill passed before the legistlature, just a matter of being a new legal statute and not a new part of the WI state constitution, why is all the rhetoric framed as though it’s a some sort of permanent change? What’s to keep the next legislature in 2 years from passing a law to repeal this one?
Overall it’s a smart move for the state to stop agreeing to costs that build up far into the future. I’m just not so sure this change will be long lasting.
Dan, how ’bout you just don’t respond to anything I have to say? You have made your thoughts and feelings clear over and over, personal insult after personal insult. I, in turn, won’t respond to anything you have to say.
You can accept this truce, or the next time I’m in Denver–I mean Aurora–I will knock on your door so we can have this discussion face-to-face where you can’t hide behind a keyboard and schoolyard taunts.
chuckle