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 ...
“What more does a state worker need to be worried about other than their salary?”
I think we should refer to people who are employed by the government as DEPENDENTS because that’s what they really are.
They also don’t get a salary, they receive “Allowance” and they are getting way to much.
That’s just one of the things that AFSCME negotiated on behalf of its membership (deducting dues directly from the member’s check and forwarding it to the union).
The teachers want to be able to negotiate class sizes etc. Tough tamales.
What an absolute pantload.
Yup. Just like everything I have ever read from this whiner.
These people are unreal..well I guess not really. The conservatives in WI need to come out in droves and counteract this sh*t.
These aholes across the nation are picking everyone’s pocket and all WI is doing is asking them to pay some of their own way.
Unbelievable.
Exactly. The dem’s aren’t our problem. It’s the media. We need everyone on this site to bring ideas to bring them in line or else.
I don’t think most on this site realize it. They know their not neutral but since the don’t carry weapons they’re off-limits. They carry the most lethal weapon there is. The Pen. They are our mosr formidable enemies. Until we neutralize them we are flailing.
Wrong the teachers are infected by this bill, but so what.
The conservatives in the whole country need to come out in droves and counteract this sh*t.
The unions are sending thugs from every state to Wisconsin.
Saturday they are planning to. Saw a post. This could get interesting.
This is exactly what is taught in 'Journalism School'. They even call it 'advocacy journalism'... Other folks, such as myself, have another name for it. We call it 'propaganda', and unashamedly so...
the infowarrior
The very first sentence set my teeth on edge. The use of the term “workers” is only a step away from calling them “proletarians”.
He's a libtard. Like other species of the mentally ill, libtards are series, very series. Nonetheless, they must be ignored.
No one is talking about silencing workers
in Wisconsin (anyone who claims to be a worker
or to speak on behalf of workers
should be filtered out of one's consciousness). All we are saying is, they can all go pound sand!
That is such a shock why he is a real looker what a catch.
where these folks get it wrong is they label the ‘government’ doing this - it’s not the government, buddy, it’s the people. You know, the other ones in the state, the ones not on public wage dole who have to pay for the public wage dole. It’s not the government holding union worker government employees hostage, it’s the government employees holding the private citizen hostage and the private citizen is fighting back and saying what part of broke and taxed enough already don’t you understand?. No government about it.
We had fair and honest elections last November, where our people expressed their desires for what kind of government they wanted. They are tired of supporting the corruption of these democrat party organizations (unions) and being bullied over.
The author of this horrible propaganda piece can be reached here: meyersonh@washpost.com
Have fun, teach him about democracy and peoples rights...
Government Greed on display.
The workers are very loud and hardly silenced. They are wrong and will lose.
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