Wisconsin Public employees: Low-wage workers would be the hardest hit

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/116194464.html

By William P. Jones

Feb. 14, 2011

Gov. Scott Walker has proposed to solve Wisconsin's budget crisis not just by reducing pay and benefits for state employees but also by repealing collective bargaining rights for nearly all public employees at the state and local levels. That is a radical departure from the state's history of peaceful labor relations and rests on the misconception that collective bargaining has enriched public employees at the expense of workers in the private sector.

When states started allowing their employees to bargain collectively in the 1960s, led by Wisconsin in 1959, their intention was to give public employees the same rights and protections that private-sector workers had enjoyed since the 1930s; for the most part that happened.

After lagging behind the private sector in the 1940s and '50s, public employees used unions to increase their wages and benefits in the following two decades. Wage increases slowed during the fiscal crises of the late 1970s and 1980s, but unions offset those losses by winning improvements to health care and retirement benefits.

Several recent studies show that total compensation (wages and benefits) for public employees is still slightly below that of workers in the private sector, but the gap has narrowed significantly in the past 50 years. In addition to economic benefits, unions won health, safety and workplace fairness protections that cost nothing to taxpayers but increased the efficiency and reliability of public services.

Contrary to the widespread perception that unions transformed government workers into what Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has called "a new privileged class," the economic benefits of unionization have gone almost entirely to the lowest-paid employees. Roughly 60% of Wisconsin's public employees have a college degree, compared to 30% in the private sector. A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute found that college graduates earn 25% less in government jobs than they do in the private sector.

FULL story at link.