Posted on 03/20/2015 1:55:05 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has signed a measure freeing workers in his state from having to pay union dues if they want to keep their jobs, naturally enough upsetting labor honchos wanting to grab every worker nickel they can. Not the least of them: Randi Weingarten, chief of the American Federation of Teachers.
“Scott Walker fails the test of common decency and common sense,” said Weingarten, who represents teacher unions that commonly abet youths in failing standardized tests. Her comments came after Walker signed a bill making his state the 25th to enact a right-to-work law that does exactly what its name implies: It gives people the right to work without forking over their hard-earned money to unions that rely on coercion to survive.
“If you want good jobs, then you must stand up for the workers who hold them,” Weingarten asserted in a statement quoted by the Wisconsin Reporter, an online news agency. “If you want a strong middle class, then you can’t take out the unions that built them. If you want higher wages, then workers need a voice.”
In fact, Walker did the opposite of reducing jobs or hurting the middle class and explicitly gave workers a voice. The legislation was a rights extension, not a denial of anything, even if President Barack Obama called it “anti-worker.” The worry of Weingarten and Obama, you see, is that these workers might do what’s best for them by refusing to pay dues to unions, some of which pay Weingarten’s annual salary (reported as $375,174, plus $182,701 in expenses) and support Obama politically.
Would these workers thereby be “anti-worker”?
No, because the reason states are enacting these laws is that unions can squeeze the life-blood out of businesses. And when you make that less likely in a state, businesses are more likely to locate there, providing more jobs, more opportunities, more cash for raising families.
Another benefit is improved education. Even before signing this bill, Walker had signed another that let teachers drop out of their unions in Wisconsin. As of last fall, something like a third had done that.
Weaker unions are less likely to pull the kinds of tricks that have haunted New York City, to pick an example outside of Wisconsin. Joel Klein, a former chancellor of New York City schools, has emboldened the anti-union argument with specifics about how it can take as long as two years and cost more than $300,000 to get an incompetent teacher out of a New York classroom, an anti-student abomination.
Weingarten gets furious at the suggestion that unions get in the way of the best education has to offer. When she was head of the United Federation of Teachers in New York, she predicted that a charter school that the union started in Brooklyn about a decade ago would prove her point.
But despite bunches of money coming its way from a foundation, it could not hang onto staff, overshot its budget and winced as many students did poorly on assessments. It is noted in a Wall Street Journal editorial, for instance, that no more than 11 percent of its students were rated as proficient in English and 18 percent in math in 2014, while many charter schools with similar demographics did considerably better.
The school is now closing its doors.
Few would question that, on occasion, unions have played a noble role in American life, but their strength in private industry lessened as past industrial faults were corrected by law and convention and as the unions themselves weakened businesses with overreaching demands. Union strength has grown in the public sector at sometimes-grievous public expense. Some political leaders such as Walker are fighting back effectively, thanks to democracy and the concept of fair play.
Jay Ambrose is the former director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard Newspapers.
Bump!
But despite bunches of money coming its way from a foundation, it could not hang onto staff, overshot its budget and winced as many students did poorly on assessments...many charter schools with similar demographics did considerably better.
The school is now closing its doors.
The Teacher’s Union spent lots of money to prove that they could run a school without teachers being accountable for their performance and ended up proving just the opposite.
What will they do in the second act? Enquiring minds want to know.
Get your popcorn folks. It’s going to be exciting.
More on Weingarten:
Dec 2014: ....“There’s a sense that people — the members who have talked to me about it — they feel very close to her,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, an AFL-CIO member and a longtime supporter of Clinton.
“They feel like she’s their colleague, that she’s their champion, that she is someone who worked doggedly in 2008 or worked doggedly as their senator,” said Weingarten, who used to helm the teachers union in New York City. She added that her own union has an endorsement process that she will adhere to.
Weingarten is also on the board of the reconstituted super PAC Priorities USA, which plans to support Clinton in a primary if necessary, according to people familiar with its plans.
The labor movement has suffered a string of defeats since the 2008 fiscal collapse. Efforts to reel in major pension obligations in several states, including blue states like New York and California, have often pitted unions against governors.
In the two years after the fiscal collapse, public-sector unions in particular became public enemy No. 1, targeted by Republican governors including New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker.”....
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/big-labor-hillary-clinton-113410.html#ixzz3UvGLQllb
The author missed an opportunity to make a great point here. As unions became more powerful in the political process they actually became a big factor in their own demise. Once you had Federal and state laws enacted -- under pressure from unions -- to mandate the kind of things that unions used to negotiate for their members (think of Social Security, Medicare, minimum wage laws, OSHA, maternity leave, etc.), then nobody needed the unions for collective bargaining purposes anymore.
Can Randy or someone explain to me why people that have a job with the government, city, county, state, federal need a union? What is so dangerous about a government job that you need union representation to protect you from the abuses of a mega corpor... oh wait they don’t work for a soulless mega corporation, they work for the American people! What harm can we do to them for mistreatment and unfair wages?
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