12 Things You Need to Know About Scott Walker, Public Workers and the Uprising in Wisconsin

[Judi Lynn]

12 Things You Need to Know About Scott Walker, Public Workers and the Uprising in Wisconsin

Public workers and supporters picketing the mansion of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, February 13, 2011

What's happening in Wisconsin is not complicated. At the beginning of this year, the state was on course to end 2011 with a budget surplus of $120 million. As Ezra Klein explained, newly elected GOP Governor Scott Walker then " signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit."

Walker then used the deficit he'd created as the justification for assaulting his state's public employees. He used a law cooked up by a right-wing advocacy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC likes to fly beneath the radar, but I described the organization in a 2005 article as "the connective tissue that links state legislators with right-wing think tanks, leading anti-tax activists and corporate money." Similar laws are on the table in Ohio and Indiana.

Walker's bill would strip public employees of the right to bargain collectively for anything but higher pay (and would cap the amount of wage hikes they might end up gaining in negotiations). His intentions are clear -- before assuming office, Walker threatened to decertify the state's employees' unions (until he discovered that the governor doesn't have that power).

But he's spinning the measure as something else -- a bitter pill state workers must swallow in order to save Wisconsin's government. So the first things you need to know are:

1. Wisconsin's public workers have already "made sacrifices to help balance the budget, through 16 unpaid furlough days and no pay increases the past two years," according to the Associated Press. The unions know their members are going to have to make concessions on benefits, but they rightly see the assault on their fundamental right to negotiate as an act of war.

More:
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/479560/12_things_you_need_to_know_about_scott_walker%2C_public_workers_and_the_uprising_in_wisconsin/

[patrice]

1. K&R

[AnneD]

2. Funny how the facts seem to be MIA...

The MSM has not reported this interesting caveat. This puts a whole new spin on it.