GOP Governors Ready to Kill Public Employee ContractsBy: David Dayen
Saturday January 1, 2011 12:29 pm
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I said on Countdown back on Monday that I didn’t think this new class of GOP governors would need to be dragged kicking and screaming into screwing public employees out of jobs and benefits. They practically campaigned on it, after all, and the full-scale demonization campaign against “greedy government workers,” financed by the malefactors of great wealth, puts the wind at their backs. So governors like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker will clearly work to break existing contracts, add furlough days or basically do whatever possible to please the base by bashing public workers.
“What does this bring? What does it mean? Where are we going here?” Marty Beil, the leader of a union that represents 22,000 of Wisconsin’s corrections officers, maintenance workers, game wardens and others, said the other day. “State employees feel like they are the target of all the slings and the arrows and the bullets that the new administration is already throwing.” <...>
December, often a sleepy time around here, brought a series of explosive episodes. Democratic leaders, pressing to approve contracts for state workers before Republicans took control, called a special session.
Mr. Walker, who has said publicly that he hopes to force public employees’ wages and benefits “into line” with everyone else’s, urged leaders against the session, saying he needed “maximum flexibility” to handle the state’s coming budgets, but Democrats argued that the contracts were not particularly beneficial to workers anyway (they included no raises and furlough time that amounted to a pay cut).
When the pay freeze and the furloughs are the key elements of the Democratic contract, you know there’s a problem. I don’t want to recount all the distortions about bringing public worker wages and benefits “into line,” but the whole concept baffles me. Instead of looking at public pensions, for example, and thinking “Why do they get that?” shouldn’t the response be “Why don’t I get that?” Especially considering the record profits workers are generating for corporations at this time.<snip>
More:
http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/01/01/gop-governors-ready-to-kill-public-employee-contracts/:kick: