What nice, fair, balanced reporting, eh?
From what I've read, the only "right" taken was the dubious right of unions to force the employers to automatically deduct dues?
Did I miss anything else?
Once workers found out that they couldn't be forced to join unions and pay the Jizya, they left in droves. Isn't this what led to the current right-to-work legislation?
>>Did I miss anything else?<<
Actually, yes, you missed a lot, and I write this as a supporter of what Walker has accomplished, by the way, but accuracy is important too.
Act 10 basically obliterated existing public-sector union contracts (with the exception of the police and fire unions which were left out of Act 10) and also removed the unions’ power to negotiate in the future over most of the items in those existing contracts, so it was a huge reduction of union rights.
Not only did it tear up existing contracts; it re-wrote major portions dealing with monetary issues. For example, nearly every school district in the state had negotiated away the obligation of teachers and staff (and administrators too, for that matter) to pay half of the annual pension obligation to the state retirement system (the employee share). Instead, over the years, school districts had negotiated themselves into a position where they would pay the employee share AND the employer share, i.e., all of the pension contributions each year.
Act 10 rewrote that and after its passage union members started seeing deductions from their paychecks equal to the employee share of pension contributions. This was actually grossly unfair because those payment arrangements had been negotiated in good faith over the years, but it happened anyway, and frankly, most voters thought it wasn’t all that unfair because most of them viewed public employees to have been given overly generous benefit packages.
Health insurance was treated similarly, although the effect on both employer and employee was usually positive because the employers could then obtain competitive bids and change insurers, reducing costs tremendously across the state.
In the end, Act 10 left union leaders at the local level with so little to negotiate that they are now effectively powerless when it comes to wage and work condition considerations.
But, as one who thinks they shouldn’t even exist in the public sector, so be it.
Another contract provision that was likely to become burdensome to the public over time was the Long-Term Care insurance that had found its way into most contracts. That provision would have been nearly impossible to negotiate out prior to Act 10, and was growing year by year in both coverage and cost.
After Act 10, if a school board wanted out of the long-term care situation, they could just drop the insurance, and I believe many did exactly that. The at least started reining it in, and I doubt that any continued expanding it.