12,000 protest Wisconsin governor's plan to bust unions
Wisconsin State Journal
Posted: Wednesday, February 16, 2011
In one of the largest protests in recent memory, thousands of angry union supporters gathered at the state Capitol on Tuesday to oppose a bill by Gov. Scott Walker that would greatly weaken organized labor in Wisconsin.
More than 12,000 protesters gathered in two separate rallies outside the Capitol, many of them carrying signs and chanting "Recall Walker" or "Kill this bill." Thousands more crowded inside the rotunda and watched TV monitors broadcasting a public hearing on the governor's proposal.
Capitol Police officers, Department of Natural Resources wardens, UW police and state troopers provided beefed-up security, but the crowd remained peaceful — if loud.
Cheers erupted every time someone in the hearing voiced opposition to the governor's bill, aimed at erasing a $137 million deficit in the current budget. Unveiled Friday, Walker's plan would remove collective bargaining rights for most of the 175,000 state and local government employees, allowing most workers to negotiate only over salary.
(Story here. Video here.)
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3 Comments:
must be nice to take time off from your public sector job to go lobby your government for more government benfits or to protect the wondrous government benefits you already receive. If I just leave my job for a day of to go lobby and protest my government, I get rired, unless I take a vacation day.
This is the arrogance of public sector workers that people like me hold in the highest disdain. Public employees have it better than anyone else, on average, in the middle class and yet they have the temerity to lobby the government to take more tax money from me to fund their plush 8am to 4:30pm jobs, gold plated pensions, and fully funded health benefits with minimal out-of-pocket expenses.
These people are not public servants, but rather they are parasites and we should rescind the JFK executive order that allowed the formation of public unions. Even FDR said public unions represent an inherent and obvious conflict of interest.
Good for Governor Walker and I hope he takes away public unions collective bargaining and allows people to opt out of a public union in Wisconsin. If these people who get to take time off to protest want to be in a union, they can go join a union in the private sector which is not a conflict of interest as public unions are.
There is a danger in our current system where liberal politicians are supported by union government employees. The more promises politicians make, the more votes they receive. This is dandy until politicians run out of money to pay for their promises. We ran out a few decades ago and unfortunately, the politicians are just now noticing. In the private sector, everyone gets to vote with their dollars, voluntarily deciding where they want to spend their money on goods and services. Not so with government goods and services. There is a coming battle between those with government jobs and government pensions and those who will be asked (taxes) to pay for it. Wisconsin is just a skirmish.
You would rather cut the pay, and take away the right to do anything about it of average hard working people making about 50k and less than raise taxes on the 2% of people who are the only ones to see their pay increase over the decade? That just don't make no walking around sense. You must have manure for brains.
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