Workers toppled a dictator in Egypt, but might be silenced in Wisconsin

The Washington Post ^ | Wednesday, February 16, 2011 | Harold Meyerson

[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.

[jimfree]

The workers are very loud and hardly silenced. They are wrong and will lose.

[Conan the Conservative]

“Get rid of all public sector unions. Period.”

Why not? Unions are needed to protect the poor workers from evil corporations with their “soaring profits” that they wont redistribute. The govt is generous, thrifty, kind, fair and enlightened and has the workers interest at heart. Why would their workers need a union? That’s like needing protection from Santa Claus.

[Secret Agent Man]

No the dems are the problem. What I was pointing out was that the media ARE democrats. When the media self-reports over 90% of media people vote democrat, where’s the difference?

Media IS Democrats. They are the same thing. One of them tries to say they are “objective” but when over 90% of them vote democrat where’s the objectivity? Why can’t they see the bias in their reporting? Because over 90% of them all believe the same thing and can’t see their own bias. And why the rest of us have stopped buying their stupid papers and magazines.