Posted on 07/16/2009 7:57:44 AM PDT by SmithL
Her speech last week used "fight" four times and "strike" just once, but that was enough to spark reports that Yvonne Walker, president of Service Employees International Union Local 1000, had called for a strike vote.
She didn't, but the speech did mark a new and tougher stance by the local – and a perilous turn for the state's biggest public employee union.
"This week the Local 1000 council voted unanimously to authorize concerted actions up to and including a strike, if necessary," Walker said in the speech webcast to SEIU members last Thursday.
Catch that? "Union actions up to and including a strike."
Walker made her speech the same day that this column reported Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants a 5 percent across-the-board pay cut on top of the thrice-monthly "Furlough Fridays" he has ordered to narrow the state's $26.3 billion budget gap.
The furloughs equal roughly a 15 percent reduction in state workers' pay and save the government's payroll about $1.3 billion over 12 months. If lawmakers don't go along with the added pay cut, the governor could add a fourth Furlough Friday.
The news racheted up angst and anger among many of California's public servants. Soon after Walker's Thursday speech, an anonymous text message circulated, encouraging a sickout on the following Wednesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
All of you are going to be a lot angrier in a year or so. You can’t make people who have no money pay taxes they can’t pay to give you exhorbitant salaries you don’t deserve to sit around doing virtually nothing.
Government bow wows think we work for them.
Maybe it’s time for them to seek employment elsewhere.
How exactly can you tell if a union state employee is on strike? Drinking coffee and sitting on their butts outside the building?
If someone is so concerned about money, then why go on strike and make no money, especially in an economy in which it is so easy to find replacement workers no less?
California is in trouble because they did SEIU’s bidding, and they are angry about it?
Simple solution, the legislature either just makes it illegal for them to strike, or they can make California a right to work state and fire their butts!
Who will hire the unhirable; especially when overall jobs are contracting?
We had an agency inspector questions us about a 180% reduction in production after we shuttered a process. He backed it up with numbers.
This is why government employees should NOT be allowed to unionize.
There is an unfair advantage to public employee unions.
The tax payers do not get a say in setting their pay or working conditions.
It is too easy to “bribe” by way of campaign donations the legislature. Since the money for pay and benefits is not coming out of their pockets they (the legislature) has no incentive to keep control of either.
I am at the point of saying if public employees want to go on strike, go for it. I no longer care.
Service is usually bad now when ever you have to deal with a public employee so how much worse can it get?
this union has STRONG ties to ACORN and does Acorns rent a mob activities
Maybe they’d like to see a chart showing the decline in TAX revenues from the layoffs/firings/reduced pay coming from the PRIVATE sector and business moving out of California! You know, the revenues that pay their salaries.
Why are public employees allowed to join a union anyway?
When these people have been through the kind of layoff that is routine in Silicon Valley, I might lend an ear. They make more money than the private sector, they have better working conditions, they have massive retirements, not a few revel in the pleasure of visiting pain upon the public, they have plump healthcare policies, and are almost impossible to fire regardless of how incompetent, wicked, or malfeasant they might be...
...and they bitch when the system collapses under their fat asses.
It just breaks my heart; fire them all and start over. At this point, there is no other way to save this state, not just from insolvency, but from the damage they do.
[They intend to protest mandatory furloughs by taking voluntary furloughs?]
When in the path of lemmings, sometimes it’s best to just stand aside.
they do not have the spine to fire them. plus most state employees are minorities and will sue for discrimination.
So, not only did you stop assembling things, you started disassembling the things you had already made? :)
What’s that Beatles tune:
He’s a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans
For Nobody
Fits, doncha think?
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