Wisconsin governor goes bonkers

Yes, yes, and yes.

You’re right that there are issues, both of substance and of messaging with the teachers’ unions. Those are issues which should be dealt with at the negotiating table, not by legislating away the existence of the table.

Don’t forget to remind her teacher(s) that their ‘skills do not merit the pay, job security, benefits or pensions they receive.’

I didn’t state one way or another how I feel about the issue. And it could be an entity from which nobody is fired AND be trimming employees through attrition and not replacing those that leave (whether due to retirement, or leaving the sector, etc.). Either way, the percentage of total workforce comprised of public sector employees is likely to continue to fall. Factor in as well that new public sector employees are not going to receive some of the nicer benefits that established ones have and would likely also vote against obligations and it isn’t a good trend for public sector obligations being (fully) met in the future.

Yes, yes, and yes.

People working in a factory or in a private sector office can only dream of such job security and benefits.

  1. So the solution is to make public sector jobs just as horrible? Why it’s an explanation, it’s a stupid line of reasoning.
  2. Comparable skill public sector jobs do not pay significantly differently. The higher benefits is offset by lower pay.

The end result is WI public employes ended up with benefits which far exceed almost all private sector workers, and probably better than 95% of the workers of the world.

No, no they don’t, and the 95% of the world comparision is ridiculous; virtually the entire US is better off than “95% of the world.”

Why should public employees earn more that private ones?

Why should wages continue to plummet against productivity (since the 70’s) and in real terms (since the capital crisis)? In your world, NO employee can command a decent salary outside very highly specialist work, and there will be no retirement for most. This will continue, rapidly, to get worse. The crisis point of even two incomes not being able to afford accommodation in many areas has been reached…

(I’m waiting to see what happens when people realize their “investment” retirement funds will never even give them back what they put into it, in most cases, inflation-adjusted)

Why should the 1% have it all? You’re arguing divide and conquer, when the very minimum people should be having is a living wage and non-scam pension, as well as reasonable job security.

See, Starlight, your mistake is in thinking that people should be treated like human beings instead of expendable chattels, and that it’s our collective responsibility to ensure that. Silly boy.

BTW, re: the drop in worker productivity reported this morning–maybe people are finally getting a little tired of busting their hump for the man when all they get for it is the Glengarry Glen Ross-style reward of “you get to keep your job…for now.”

Do they? The chart in this article says ‘it depends’. Generally they don’t, but there are a few categories of people - this data is by education level - who do (high school, some college, associates degree).

I’ll say this: I do think the unions are a lost cause now. You’re not going to win on that issue. I think the reason this occurs in the US and not Europe is because Americans have a higher belief in their abilities, even if it isn’t necessarily justified.

If I was the Dems: I’d be making every effort to narrow the anti-corporate message to anti-megacorp. Praise the small businesses and the privately owned ones, go after the “soulless” big public corps with a religious fervor.
I do think there is mileage in Bain Capital, the banking crisis. The issue is keeping the Republicans from equating attacks on big business to attacks on all business. You have to narrowly tailor things.

Argument: private corps will reflect the moral values of their owner- see, for example, Stardock. A public corp will only reflect the desire for short-term ravaging profit, and the investors are incapable of caring for anything else, so government needs to protect society (and the corporation itself) from its own short-term greed. This actually has some basis in economics.

To use another example: you yourself have said that many of the things you have done over the years, you would never have been able to do if you had to listen to shareholders. Yet, I believe if you hadn’t taken those actions- Stardock would be in a much worse position. The one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that you have a tendency to take a long-term approach to your own business, an approach you wouldn’t be able to if you had to listen to shareholders.

Ironically, I do think the big money that’s put into politics, is becoming less and less effective- as this election showed that 95% of people made up their minds ahead of time. I suspect that trend will continue, as it’s a lot easier to find news you agree with- and that’s what just about everyone does. This reduces the impact of political advertising.

A global market sets wages and benefits, we no longer have the luxury of saying these jobs get XYZ pay. While the last decade or so has been bad for hundreds of millions European, US, and Japanese workers it has really good for the billion plus workers in China, India, and Brazil who were formerly existing on a buck or two day but now have jobs that allow protein a couple times a week, a few sets a cloths a year, cleaner water, indoor plumbing, and such luxuries as cellphone and access to the internet.

If public sector workers are truly underpaid and then cutting their benefits should cause many of them to quit and look for jobs in the private sector. Of course that isn’t what we are seeing, and volunteer turnover in public sector jobs remains at a fraction of private sector.

Even after cuts regulars WI public employees (excluding cops and firefighters who get even better benefits) can start work right after college, retire at 57 with 70% of their salary with COLA adjustments and have very inexpensive health insurance. Almost no private employer offer retirement plans like this.

It is also no longer true that almost all US workers are better off than 95% of the world’s population. Lower class workers in the US are worse of than middle class workers in the Eurozone, Japan, many Commonwealth countries, and the upper class in the BRIC countries, and the Middle East.
Simply being born in the US no longer entitles to you to live like a king.

Man, there are some cheap shots being leveled at Wardell, and lousy attempts to invalidate his arguments. He makes too much money and he doesn’t alienate his friends seems to be the best you guys can do. Pathetic.

Anyway, there is a rising tide of anger and frustration toward public school teacher unions in the country, regardless of your opinion of how hard they work or how competent they are on average. Articles like this one and movies like this one have gone a great distance toward framing the argument around the notion of accountability rather than strictly about benefits. Once you’ve painted the unions as obstructionist, it’s easy to pour gas on the fire by mentioning benefits like pensions. The truth is municipalities have a history of signing lousy deals with unions, and maybe it takes weakening the unions a bit to get more equitable contracts?

While it’s true you can easily fall into the ‘blame Sarah Palin’ that your other political side was very keen on initialy, all i can give you is this link from our ‘right-wing’ press in the uk that covers the concern quite well:

I can also say i do get to watch your media news from time to time (FOX/CNN/ABC etc) and i can say with hand on heart, and no political investment in your system, that it is frankly amazing considering the rhetoric, in particular from a station like FOX (and right-leaning radio shows etc), that tragic shootings don’t happen more often. Media is perfectly capable of legtimizing (to a viewer) any action, history has proven that many times.

So my concern is whenever i see that kind of stoked-up, heated political debate, that there is some reason behind the use of that language, one that will have been analyzed and gone over in the editorial process very diligently. My gut instinct is that certain parties on the right would like to see a ‘revolution’, to wipe the slate clean so to speak. Why else use extreme flamitory language in such an official (it’s on TV/radio/in a paper it must be true) manner? It certainly feels like you are being incited (to rage) when you watch/listen to it.

It’s very different (disturbing) from watching the news in the uk that’s for sure!

I think that site is biased. Maybe not the best source to pick. Also the general public… where do those guys live and how did you poll all of them? ;)

Yes, sadly yes, sadly yes.

I do agree that the resentment about unions made is part of what the difference. I also think that is the case because the general public (LOL those guys again) doesn’t know what role most unions play and why they are needed.

What seems to be happening is pitting working class people against each other while real issues are being left untouched. A dangerous game that has sadly been played to often already in history.

Hey, corporations are people, you’re calling for a manhunt :P No, I do agree with your point.

I’m not convinced. I do think money is playing a far to important role in politics. If it had no effect and all politicians would be totally unbiased by it… nobody would invest in it.

I can’t say I disagree that partisan media on both sides use heated rhetoric to stir up their base, and especially on website and talk radio you hear people advocating violence. It seldom actually ends up in violence. I suspect it it has more do with rating than anything else.

In the Giffords case it was the left wing media that leapt to the wrong conclusion before the facts were in but I have little doubt if Loughner’s first name was Mohammad that Fox would have pulled a similar stunt.

It is worth keeping in mind, the overall crime including violent crimes in the US has been on 30+ year decline and other than murder the US actually has less per capita crime including violent crime than the UK. It must be the football/soccer matches :).

FWIW, question time at Parliament seems pretty scary (albeit entertaining) on this side of the Atlantic.

I didn’t say money isn’t playing an important role, it just didn’t play an important role here.

Ads and information- I believe it needs to be tailored into newcomers to the US, because I see them as the only real source of undecided votes left in the US.

That’s why the aisle is 2 1/2 sword lengths wide, right?

Um, it was the liberals on the SC that ruled that wealthy mogols can take your house if they want to build a mall where you live.

The Republicans are indeed more blatant about being pro-business, but the Democrats rarely do anything to hurt their wealthy supporters/contributors either. This is a systematic problem that rules Washington.

You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don’t know where the fuck it’s gonna take you.

This is true. Anti-union sentiment and resentment is borne out of propaganda, nothing more. That Brad Wardell and the “general public” believes the propaganda doesn’t make it any less so. It is favorable for businesses/administrators (and by extension, the politicians they back) to push anti-union sentiment. So we talk about the outliers, we focus on this teacher or that teacher who just can’t be fired because UNIONS and all of a sudden people think that’s what unions do. They forget about all of the good they do for their members, about securing benefits so they can have healthcare and about stopping school boards, say, from firing everybody every year and hiring all new teachers just out of college to save money.

It’s divide and conquer, because that’s still the best way to keep your opponent busy and distracted. Keep them fighting amongst themselves, keep them distrusting each other. And they’ve succeeded admirably, over the past couple of decades, in convincing even middle-class working people to consistently vote against their own interests in favor of things that will help nobody but corporations and politicians.

The world for workers, pre-unions, was bad. I think people mistakenly think that they won all their fights and now unions are not needed any more, as if the nature of businesses and corporations has changed in the 21st century to be altruistic and take care of their workers out of the good of their hearts. But we know this isn’t true. Pay disparity between men and women, working conditions at the un-unionized distribution warehouses for giant online retailers–the list goes on. I think unions need to reform, they need to be better about who they protect and how, for example, in the case of bad teachers who should by all rights be fired but can’t be. But like ReptileHouse says, these are things that should happen at the negotiating table. You shouldn’t throw out the table.

Amen.

My wife is a teacher here in the DC suburbs. You need a master’s degree to get hired around here and your starting salary will be somewhere in the range of $25K. Teachers US-wide are the lowest-paid college professionals. [note: a “college professional” is someone who requires (a) a college degree from an accredited school and (b) a certification in the field to get hired; it includes lawyers, doctors, nurses, etc. You can become an architect without a degree, but not an elementary teacher (in most states)]

I used to believe that the local teacher’s union was just a waste of a goodly percentage of my wife’s meager paycheck. Around here they don’t seem to do much in terms of increasing their pay (local teachers haven’t gotten a pay raise in six years - I think they got a 1% cost-of-living bump three years back) and they seemed to be more-or-less a rubber-stamp for whatever the schoolboard decided.

One day my wife was helping out another teacher, and a 6th-grader stabbed a pencil an inch into another kid’s arm. My wife grabbed the attacker’s arm and wrestled the pencil away from him as he went to stab the kid a second time. The principal was brought in, cops were called, the attacking kid was expelled. All pretty routine, these types of things happen.

But then the parents of the attacker decide to sue my wife for assault/negligence in civil court. She bruised his arm when she grabbed him; she used unnecessary force; he really wasn’t going to stab the other kid again; it was all an accident; the teachers at the school all had it out for him; yadda, yadda.

OK, all annoying and wrenching for my wife, but that’s life in litigious America. Nothing was ever going to go to court: the family smelled the opportunity for a settlement from us, the school, the county… somebody. It sucks, and it meant months of stress for me and my spouse, but it would resolve itself with (probably) little money out of my pocket .

But then the school placed my wife (and the classroom teacher) on administrative leave WITHOUT PAY until the court stuff worked itself out. Remember that we’re not talking about a criminal charge, only civil. That meant that my wife would be out of work for probably six months for preventing a kid from stabbing another kid.

Of course my wife was devastated and just completely lost. Luckily, my income would have been more than enough for us, but if she had been single or divorced or whatever, she would have had to go wait tables or something to feed her kids.

It turns out we didn’t even have to call the union. They started monitoring the situation as soon as it started to unfold. I forget the lawyer’s name (and I’m ashamed of this fact - I should be sending him Christmas cards every year), but he called us that same night and told my wife not to worry about anything and to be ready to go to work the next morning.

He then fell on the county and the school like a pile of jagged bricks. I have no idea what he said to whom, but about an hour later he called back. My wife and the other teacher were to report to school as normal the next morning. The principal and the local school-cluster supervisor would be providing a formal letter of apology for the “administrative mistake” that had accidentally befallen them. Furthermore, the two of them were not to have any contact with the suing family - the county would be providing a lawyer to deal with them along with the union lawyer.

That alone would have turned me pretty pro-union, but the guy wasn’t finished. Over the next few days he contacted the suing family and their lawyer, and this part we did get second-hand. He “suggested” that if civil neglect was being charged, then the police really ought to get involved and see if there was any criminal misconduct on the teacher’s part or on the part of the student. To “assist” this potential investigation, the union was going to hire an investigator, and this investigator was going to want to interview everyone in the household as to their immigration status… so would Wednesday work for them?

The next week when the first hearing on the civil case was scheduled, no one from the plaintiff’s side showed up. It turns out they just… left town. Packed up, abandoned the house, no one from the school system ever saw them again.

Total cost to me: $0, if you don’t count the union dues. And I don’t; not anymore.