Duh!
The market!
If you cannot feed yourself you deserve to starve.
If you cannot pay for a roof you deserve to freeze.
Sure as shit it is no one else’s problem. If you suck at life then die…at least you’ll be doing the gene pool a favor if you can’t reproduce.
I belong to the teachers’ union (though in a right-to-work state). I don’t have any of that.
Well, sure, you’d say that, wouldn’t you, being in a union, and all. If only you had the patriotism and public-spirit of the Koch Brothers, AIG, and Halliburton. But, nooooooo!
Fair Labor Standards Act - federal.
I actually meant to comment on this earlier and this reminds me.
Someone can tell me if I am wrong but my understanding is the awesome deals of sweet pensions and tenure for life are pretty much things of the past.
Your mom or dad had them but you and I have nothing like that.
Can any young poster here starting their teaching career claim that in 5 years they will get tenure and no one can fire them along with sweet pension plans?
Anyone? Bueller?
Thanks.
I once knew this stuff when I worked in HR but that was many moons ago (don’t ask how many…I don’t want to lie…long enough I have “senior moments” trying to remember).
I made no such claim - every group in our society has a political agenda. Including public service workers. An ideal civil service would be completely non-partisan, and so will never exist in human society. But public unions are an improvement over the patronage systems of the past - does it create a political force? Certainly.
I see no reason why public service workers should be prevented from exercising their political rights. The level of influence, and the means by which they may pursue it, are less than other sectors and their strong arm tactics can be an effective counterbalance to the strong arm of chambers of commerce and other private interest groups, as we are seeing in Wisconsin right now.
Take away the public unions and government will be that much closer to only serving private interests, and public interests be damned.
I can’t quantify this but I know of quite a few Federal employees who specifically sought out the pension package which, according to them, has changed for newer workers.
Oh paaaaleeeeaaase. In my parents day people stood in soup lines to survive. Today we subsidize damn near everything including free cell phones. The safety net is pretty damn large.
I think you have an overly generous assessment of what it is to be destitute in this country but even if you are correct that we’d give cell phones to homeless people the point is the conservatives want to see you pay for your crime of being poor.
At the least you just need to suck-up being poor. Do not expect help. If you get it then it is largess and be grateful.
Quoth Sam Stone:
If I’m understanding what you’re saying, then unions are a good idea for expendable/interchangeable workers, but not for workers who are not expendable. I’d almost agree with that, but with one quibble: It’s not whether the workers actually are expendable that’s important, but whether management thinks they’re expendable. Take teachers, for example: When I mentioned upthread that teachers might strike over a policy of being used as amateur bomb squads, I wasn’t being hyperbolic. Before my mom retired, the teachers really were literally used that way. If there was a bomb threat at a school, district policy was to get all the kids outside, then to send all the teachers back inside to look for the bomb. Now, there is a world of difference between a good teacher and a bad one, but no matter what the quality of a teacher, it’s idiotic to have them looking for bombs. When you’ve got management treating employees like that, what choice do they have but to unionize?
I have worked for both the State of Alaska and the State of Washington over the last ten years and have never been eligible for a defined benefit retirement.
Unions still have to negotiate with the State, the outcomes of the negotiation may be seen slightly later in the public sector than the private sector but the two sectors virtually mirror each other.
IMHO, public sector jobs get a few more benefits at the cost of salary; private sector jobs get a boost in salary at the cost of benefits. Private sector jobs at the high end get more than anybody.
If you want to cut the budget, find public services that you don’t want to fund, and cut them. The majority of public employees are civilian employees and not political appointments. They do their jobs day in and day out regardless of the political wind that is blowing.
If you feel that the best policy would be to fire half of them every time a new party is in office, go ahead, you will be left with nothing.
If a job with the State is so great, nothing is stopping you from getting one.
I think one of the problems is that unions, when they first started, were fighting battles on child labor, workplace safety, 40 hour weeks, things like that. All of these things are now covered by federal laws, OSHA, etc… leaving the unions scrambling to find new issues to keep themselves relevant.
Workplace safety is supremely relevant – notice all the mining disasters lately?
Other battles include fighting trade policies that send jobs overseas, dwindling health benefits, and the most important thing – negotiating “just cause” provisions in collective bargaining agreements.
“Deserve” is the wrong word, as it implies a moral judgement, but yeah, that’s pretty much the way biology works.
I’m all for society caring for the old and weak and disabled, but if you’re an able-bodied adult, you can feed your damn self. And yes, I have had to walk to the food pantry, and I have slept outside at night – in winter, in Chicago – because I had nowhere to go.
None of which really has anything to do with middle-class professionals freaking out because their salary and benefits might get trimmed.
So your example of how conservatives want to punish poor people is that teachers unions get no more than a 8% raise.
I would think that, if we are such evil geniuses, we could do better than that.
Don’t you think that this might be why unions lose credibility? They drag this kind of rhetoric out every time they go on strike. And then the rest of the world, who manage somehow to survive with a smaller increase than 8%, has little patience to spare for the whining.
Especially since the rest of Wisconsin, who probably did not get a 9% bump, has to pay the taxes so the public unions can.
This is the real world. At some point, the unions need to be told this. Suck it up and save the bullshit about how people are going to starve in the streets because they didn’t get a double-digit increase.
Regards,
Shodan
And conservatives can save the bullshit that the unions are killing them.
So, the governor created a budget imbalance then goes after the unions to fix it.
(Note the “Fiscal Bureau” is Wisconsin’s equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office)
Again I will ask for a more objective cite than the Cap Times, with which I am familiar from my days in Madtown (I graduated from the UW-Madison), and which advertises itself as “Your Progressive Voice”. I find it difficult to accept at face value a source than labels whatever Republicans spend as “special interests” (shock! horror!) but not unions.
Regards,
Shodan
The Governor gives massive tax cuts to the rich and then exults, “Oh my, we have a budget crisis!”
Rachel Maddow last night had a good point about the right wanting to disrupt the unions because post Citizens United, they are the only thing standing against Conservative electoral funding dominance: Billionaires vs. Bakesales
Dude…the link to the Fiscal Bureau memo is in my post.
They are the equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office in Wisconsin.
What more do you want?
The stuff below that link you might claim is a liberal bullshit assessment of the tax cuts but that the cuts happened is without a doubt and sans those cuts there’d be no budget crisis (indeed I think I read Wisconsin would have a surplus). That is proved for you already.