Wisconsin Anti-union Bill

Well, the Republicans figured out a way around the requirement for 20 Senators; they simply pulled the key provisions eliminating collective bargaining for municipal unions out of the revenue bill and made it a separate non-revenue based measure.

I’m not going to criticize them for the end-run. It’s the same sort of trick the Democrats pulled in Congress on Health Care Reform to get around the Republican filibuster. It just goes to show how difficult it is to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

I am going to criticize them for taking away what has been a basic right in American society for most of this century, a right that has been paid for in blood by past union members, the right to collectively bargain.

For those that are condemning the municipal workers for having pensions and other benefits which are too lucrative, allow me to remind you that these things were accepted for years in lieu of pay raises. For decades this kept municipal workers behind private sector employees in salaries. I don’t remember anyone in the private sector complaining when they were making more money than municipal employees.

Now, thanks to big business outsourcing all of those lucrative manufacturing jobs, what the municipal unions “settled for” in the past has suddenly become something they don’t deserve.

New realities are new realities, and everyone has to work within the new rules going forward and the unions were clearly ready to do that. Stripping them of the primary benefit of a union, the ability to collectively bargain, however strikes me as more aimed at union busting that resolving a budget crisis.

I’d like to think the Republican Party will pay dearly for this, but they won’t. They’ll find someone to pin the blame on for something and distract the electorate again. Someone else taking nickels and dimes out of the electorate’s tax dollars while the Republicans divert $5 and $10, which never make it into the electorate’s paychecks to begin with, to the already wealthy.

Let’s face it, the American electorate is just too stupid to realize that big business, and its partner the Republican Party, have just robbed them blind again.