I believe that the summary is pretty accurate. Here are some of the problems that it causes.
1. Having contracts have to be negotiated yearly is a waste. Contract negotiations take time and effort and often can be contentious (regardless of whether you are in the public or private sector). There is no reason to not negotiate a 3 or 4 year contract, possibly with opt out clauses, and focus on the actual work in the interim. It's wasteful. 2. Total wages, I believe, includes benefit supports by the employer. By artificially capping at the CPI, it doesn't take into account the rise if health care costs and similar factors. Regardless, I thought we want government to run more like a business? Would you support a law that told businesses that they couldn't give raises above the CPI? In general, most raises probably won't be much higher than the CPI and might be lower. But artificially limiting the options is bad management practice. 3. What the hell is reasonable about dissolving a union every year unless they have another vote? Great, more paperwork, more money spent on something stupid, more opportunities to have management interfere elections. Unions can be dissolved, there are mechanisms in place already. Maybe we need to strengthen those. Requiring a reauthorization of all unions every single year is just wasteful and stupid hoop jumping solely for the purpose of making unionization harder. So much for reducing bureaucracy, right? 4. Not allowing employers to collect union dues. Awesome. Let's add another unneeded layer of complication! Employers are the ones who are already processing payments, deducting taxes, ira deposits, premium payments, etc. Why the hell would you add a whole separate scheme for collecting union dues, post payroll? No reason other than to just make life harder on unions and union members. Punishment and stupid regulations, plain and simple. 5. Members of the collective bargaining unit wouldn't be required to pay dues. This is really the heart of what they were after when Republicans in Wisconsin passed this law. Everything else was about punishment for the audacity of having a union and being a union member. This one, however, gets to the heart of what collective bargaining is. Collective bargaining is the notion that an entity, in this case a union, is going to negotiate the wages, benefits, etc for a class of workers, say classified staff at a college. The union does the heavy lifting in terms of contract negotiations and are paid to try and get the best deal for their clientele, just like a sports agent gets paid for negotiating a players contract with a team. If a worker can get all the benefits of the negotiated contract without having to put any money toward the actual negotiation of the contract it completely blows the notion of collective bargaining out of the water. It is no longer collective bargaining because some reasonable portion of the collective is no longer participating in the bargaining, just the receiving of whatever benefits are negotiated by the people that other folks pay for. The words Collective Bargaining no longer apply and it's wrong to use them. The law effectively eviscerates collective bargaining but tries to pretend that it keeps unions around. It's totally dishonest and complete bullshit. If they had passed a law that just gets rids of unions for public employees it would have at least been honest. No, instead they redefine the notion of collective bargaining and then pass a bunch of add on rules so that if unions somehow survive in some form from the redefinition of collective bargaining or a court strikes down the rule on collective bargaining, then they still have a bunch of onerous rules in place designed, at every turn, to just make things more complicated, to add layers of regulation, to make things slower and more tedious and make every single little thing having to do with unions harder. It's anti-worker, it's bad for productivity, it's dishonest and purely driven by an ideological motive to crush unions in any way possible without regard to side effects on anything else. Hope that helps clarify things. Cheers, Judah On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 11:02 AM, Cameron Childress <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have been casually observing the Collective Bargaining thing that seems > to be att he root of the whole Wisconsin thing. Most of my information > comes from my own research, or from mainstream media. I am very not > interested in extreme left or right talk radio. > > So - I decided I'd take a look at the law changes that started this whole > thing to get a direct, un-politically-polluted plain english description of > the changes. I don't really care about who funded what or what crybaby got > his feelings hurt - I am just interested in what the real change was. > > I ended up here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Wisconsin_Act_10 > > Assuming the wikipedia article is correct (admitting it may have flaws) > there are alot of changes, but the items under collective bargaining are: > > *"Collective Bargaining:* The bill would make various changes to limit > collective > bargaining <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_bargaining> for most > public employees to wages. Total wage increases could not exceed a cap > based on the consumer price > index<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_price_index> (CPI) > unless approved byreferendum <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendum>. > Contracts would be limited to one year and wages would be frozen until the > new contract is settled. Collective bargaining units are required to take > annual votes to maintain certification as a union. Employers would be > prohibited from collecting union dues and members of collective bargaining > units would not be required to pay dues. These changes take effect upon the > expiration of existing contracts. Local law enforcement and fire employees, > and state troopers and inspectors would be exempt from these changes." > > None of these sound unreasonable to me. If I work somewhere that's > unionized but I don't want to be part of the union or pay dues, now I don't > have to. The union has to have a valid reason to exist once a year by vote > (which should be super easy for any worthwhile union). Wage increases are > pegged to CPI - this all seems very reasonable to me. > > Perhaps there is an additional item I am missing? Does anyone have any > links to a good (neutral) alternate summary of the law that has something > else worse in there? > > -Cameron > > ... > > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:351814 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/unsubscribe.cfm
