States wrong to attack public workers’ benefits
Many people may have been watching or listening to coverage about the battle between the Wisconsin state government and public sector unions.
To achieve a balanced budget and reduce the deficit, Gov. Scott Walker proposed cutting public service employees’ benefits and collective bargaining rights.
This resulted in major protests all over Madison, Wis., most notably when the workers flooded the state capitol building and refused to leave until the cuts were eliminated.
Critics argued that it wasn’t fair for the state to eliminate its workers’ collective bargaining rights and their benefits in order to make ends meet. They also pointed out that Walker was using the cuts to cover the nearly $1 billion budget shortfall from tax cuts to corporations.
Regardless of his own reasoning, other states, including Nebraska, are now following suit and are contemplating cutting the pay and benefits of teachers, firemen, policemen, librarians, sanitation workers, professors, and others in the public sector.
It seems that for the sake of big business, executive golden parachutes, and lower tax rates for the wealthy the burden will fall on those who make the least in our society.
Not only that, the right to strike and collectively bargain for better wages is now coming under attack. But the real reason behind these cuts is not financial, it is political.
With public workers no longer allowed to be the model for collective bargaining, there will be nothing to stand between the working class and the wealthy class’s control over policy.
Our professors and faculty at Chadron State College are some of the hardest working people around, yet they are portrayed as the problem and the reason for our economic woes.
Our public sector workers need our support, not our condemnation.
Actually, it it’s no longer a proposal, the Wisconsin state legislature succeeded in passing the “Budget Repair Bill” that includes limiting collective bargaining for public employees. That’s the bad news. The good news is although it was passed and is technically the law of the land, it hasn’t been implemented due to a technicality, i.e., due to the WAY it was passed (according to a judge, it may have violated a state open meeting law). Regardless, it’s another example of the way Americans are led to believe it’s “us against them”–whether a Democrat or Republican. I hope that people in Nebraska are more open minded (as they were when I was at CSC), or at least more respectful of their neighbors, particularly those that teach our kids, put out our fires, police our streets, and the list goes on…
I graduated from CSC in 1996 and now live in Madison, Wis., the heart of the protest!
It is wonderful to live in a place where 100,000 people took over the captiol to stand up for workers rights.
Here is what is currently going on:
here is a link http://www.wkow.com/Global/story.asp?S=14276368
we had an election 2 weeks ago—this election was huge b/c it would flip the supreme court from conservative to liberal- but now it looks like the republicans may have tried to steal the election and the feds have been called to come investigate.
To get to the point- this is LONG from over- the people of Wisconsin are not going anywhere- there are still protests every day at the capitol and marches every weekend.
I have never seen solidarity like this-this is well worth the watch it sums up what it’s like to be in our captiol in solidarity with all the hard workers of this country-