Posted on 09/21/2012 9:18:13 AM PDT by Hunton Peck
The chocolate ration has been increased from 30 grams to 25 grams, and gasoline has dropped to $5.50 a gallon, Citizen!!!
How ironic that the contract negotiations were announced on September 19 - International Talk Like A Pirate Day!
Dane County and its unions treated the taxpeasants to a game of "The Pirate Captain and The Cabin Boy" - dry.
This contract does not appear to be a give away to the Union. Wage decreases are in it?
What am I missing?
I don’t know the details of the contract, but typically, the most lucrative part of being a government employee is the benefits, not the salary or wages. Plus, the benefits of the WI teacher contracts have been largely to the unions themselves, rather than to the membership (the unions have historically run the sole health insurance provider the districts are permitted to contract with, for example, but one of the changes in Act 10 was to open up the process to competition by third-party insurers).
The union members may well end up losing in the longer run, especially if the higher overall costs under the contracts force layoffs rather than other savings when budgets must be cut. You can be sure, however, that the unions didn’t jump all over the recent — and soon to be overruled — county court decision with such haste in order to reduce the size of their piece of the pie. If they had, the union folks with their Che t-shirts wouldn’t have been out celebrating in Madison this week.
A union which has to accept a wage decrease is a defeat for that union no matter what the benefits are.
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