The purpose of this column is to make the reader aware of current events in politics and media and to explain the facts from both sides to get a real picture of the argument instead of having message skewed through mainstream media. This is one man trying to relate to college students the hot issues of the world so as to make the information for accessible. The column will present an opinion but will do the it’s best to only use opinions supported by lines of evidence.
Patrick Olds
– Opinions Editor –
As the battle of government bargaining rights in Wisconsin rages, people from around the world are taking sides. From the newly revolutionized Egypt to the parents of children in Madison, Wis. — whose schools were closed for three days last week due to the large number of teachers who took off work to protest, people are tuned in to this battle due to the potential dominos that could fall.
Newly-elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker proposed that government employees would have to sacrifice a little in order for the state to cut its budget shortfall of $3.6 billion.
Walker and the Republican-led legislature are trying to pare down the collective bargaining for government employees, potentially “breaking” government unions.
This proposed law would require state employees to pay 5.8 percent of their salary toward pensions and 12.6 percent of their insurance costs. This is far less than workers in the private sector who work in the same field.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and the Rev. Jesse Jackson tried to get the people fired up while leading a chant of “We Shall Overcome.”
Protest leaders are arrogant enough to compare this situation to the crisis in Egypt.
Let’s be clear, the people of Egypt had no rights to collectively bargain within government or within the small private sector. The government employees of Wisconsin are getting a reality check regarding benefits. There’s a large difference.
It turns out the heads of the government-employee unions are willing to concede the benefit cuts after it was discovered that if they didn’t accept, 11,000 to 16,000 employees would have to be laid off. The unions were more willing to let people go than lose their power and the benefits they had accrued.
Now the unions are in survival mode. They realize that if collective bargaining is off the table, they can no longer force employees, who aren’t even part of the unions, to pay union dues.
On one of the major news stations, reporters were interviewing teachers in Wisconsin, one of whom said that she didn’t want to be part of the union but she was forced to pay $1,000 in dues anyway.
People who want to say the GOP is big and bad and doesn’t care about workers, do not use logic to reach that conclusion. The government employees are paid by taxpayers, not by a company that accrues profit.
Any collective bargaining is not taking a part of profit from a specific company. It is just charging the bill to taxpayers. Money is not created out of thin air.
Something else to consider, even while their teachers receive among the most generous benefits in the U.S., is that Wisconsin students score among the bottom five states in test scores.
If Wisconsin and other states are to dig themselves out of their budget crises, concessions will have to be made.
The concessions requested in Wisconsin are more than reasonable — and even Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man who grew the government larger than any other president before him, said it was “unthinkable and intolerable” for government unions to strike.
