Posted on 02/17/2011 9:20:41 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In the United States, by contrast, February is shaping up as the cruelest month workers have known in decades.
The coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens of thousands of Egyptian workers went on strike beginning last Tuesday. By Friday, when Egypt's military leaders apparently decided that unrest had reached the point where Mubarak had to go, the Egyptians who operate the Suez Canal and their fellow workers in steel, textile and bottling factories; in hospitals, museums and schools; and those who drive buses and trains had left their jobs to protest their conditions of employment and governance. As Jim Hoagland noted in The Post, Egypt was barreling down the path that Poland, East Germany and the Philippines had taken, the path where workers join student protesters in the streets and jointly sweep away an authoritarian regime.
But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo, one state government in particular was moving to topple workers' organizations here in the United States. Last Friday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin's new Republican governor, proposed taking away most collective bargaining rights of public employees. Under his legislation, which has moved so swiftly through the newly Republican state legislature that it might come to a vote Thursday, the unions representing teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose the right to bargain over health coverage, pensions and other benefits. (To make his proposal more politically palatable, the governor exempted from his hit list the unions representing firefighters and police.) The only thing all other public-sector workers could bargain over would be their base wages, and given the fiscal restraints plaguing the states, that's hardly anything to bargain over at all.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
He can’t be series. Comparing a duly elected (by 6%, no less) Governor with a “dictator”?
Barf alert?
Good gawd!
This is naked propaganda.
Since the WaPo is conflating Egypt and Wisconsin, they may as well also make the popular liberal comparison of Gov. Scott Walker vs. Hitler or Mubarak.
Does this guy actually get paid to write? What a stretch of logic to equate the unemployed people of Egypt with a the impossible to fire cushy job union thugs that are bankrupting a state.
Desperation knows no bounds.
By “workers,” they mean “fascist mobs.”
The Commies are way off the mark on this one. If Walker was seeking to disband public unions, I could see the reaction. Yet, all he is asking them to do is to put a small fraction of the private sector money they already receive into their own retirements and healthcare premiums.
The out-of-proportion reaction to this simple bill by Obama and his libs should tell all private citizens what they need to know about their motives.
Idiot. The military wanted Mubarak out before the protests. The noise in the street just gave them cover. It was not a revolution, it was a coup....as time will tell. The only real regime in Egypt was the military...the only real revolution will be against them...not with their compliance.
I keep thinking the Dem’s aren’t our worst enemy. It’s the msm. Until we come up w a plan to neutralize them we will lost this war.
The big, big difference is that the government unions are the exploiters in Wisconsin.
The Teachers Unions are a bunch of lazy, unaccountable, grossly overpaid parasites.
Well, to be accurate, Walker’s bill does remove all negotiation except for salary from State Workers. The thing that really has the union bummed, though, is that the State won’t collect the union dues anymore and pass them along to the unions. The unions will have to collect their dues directly from their members. Also, the unions must be recertified by the membership on a yearly basis.
The reason that Walker wants to remove all negotiations from the unions is that the average to settle a contract in WI is 15 months. This simply won’t do with the budget crisis at hand.
Workers of the world unite. The only thing you have to lose is your chains. To each according to his need; from each according to his means. A spectre is haunting America.
If ever there was proof that commies and ordinary folks see the world in a completely different way, this is IT.
Looked at the first couple of pages of comments. The WAPOST readers are about ready to riot over this guy and the labor goons.
The only thing every other worker is able to bargain for is salary. It’s hardly extreme.
Being made to put a small percentage into your pension (the overwhelming amount still is paid by all the rest of the citizens). Right now they pay nothing into their pensions, 100% taxpayer funded. Private sector workers don’t have this.
Being made to pay 1/8 of your healthcare premium. Right now they pay nothing. No private sector worker pays nothing or only 1/8 of their healthcare premiums.
It’s hardly extreme. And this will be happening. We are effing broke. We have no money to keep shoveling at the unions. Gravy train is over.
This bill also will allow people to not have to join a union if they don’t want to.
You want to talk about not having freedom? How about being a union slave if you want to get a job?
Yep. That’s why we need to put an end to government-funded indoctrination centers that are currently referred to as public schools.
The teachers aren’t even being affected by this bill.
They do realize they are next however. And they are next.
Egypt wasn’t a “worker’s movement”.
Can’t Communists and Socialists see ANYTHING outside of their agenda?
Get it straight: DEMS == MSM. MSM == DEMS -you can substitute “LIBERAL” for “DEMS”. Same difference.
The MSM has self admitted that over 90% of them vote democrat.
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