Wisconsin

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fnord123
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Re: Wisconsin

Post by fnord123 » Thu Mar 10, 2011 10:36 am

Storm wrote:But it's precisely because we had unions to fight for our rights, and I mean literally fight, that we are even to this point now.  You realize that when the first unions formed, they were made illegal, and police and mercenaries were brought in to literally bust up picket lines and people were killed.  Management knew that if they just made an example of one or two people, killing or beating them, the rest would fall back in line.
Unions did help to improve the condition of the worker.  However, that doesn't mean that without collective bargaining rights that the condition of the worker would go down.  Federal government employees, for instance, are prohibited by law from collective bargaining for pay increases, and yet they have some of the highest pay of public sector workers. 
brajalle
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Re: Wisconsin

Post by brajalle » Thu Mar 10, 2011 6:51 pm

fnord123 wrote:
Storm wrote:But it's precisely because we had unions to fight for our rights, and I mean literally fight, that we are even to this point now.  You realize that when the first unions formed, they were made illegal, and police and mercenaries were brought in to literally bust up picket lines and people were killed.  Management knew that if they just made an example of one or two people, killing or beating them, the rest would fall back in line.
Unions did help to improve the condition of the worker.  However, that doesn't mean that without collective bargaining rights that the condition of the worker would go down.  Federal government employees, for instance, are prohibited by law from collective bargaining for pay increases, and yet they have some of the highest pay of public sector workers. 
They're also some of the highest educated workers out there, and carry extreme responsibility.  Also, I'd not consider the armed forces to be highly paid.  Yet, the private sector typically has them beat in pay for similar education/responsibility (the non-unique ones, like FBI agents).
fnord123
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Re: Wisconsin

Post by fnord123 » Thu Mar 10, 2011 7:18 pm

brajalle wrote:
fnord123 wrote: Unions did help to improve the condition of the worker.  However, that doesn't mean that without collective bargaining rights that the condition of the worker would go down.  Federal government employees, for instance, are prohibited by law from collective bargaining for pay increases, and yet they have some of the highest pay of public sector workers. 
They're also some of the highest educated workers out there, and carry extreme responsibility.  Also, I'd not consider the armed forces to be highly paid.  Yet, the private sector typically has them beat in pay for similar education/responsibility (the non-unique ones, like FBI agents).
Do you have data or studies that show this?  From the article linked below, federal employees earn more than their private sector counterparts and other public sector workers (state, local), even for jobs that don't carry "extreme responsibility" - dental assistant, graphic designer, and janitor being three examples.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/201 ... -pay_N.htm
MarySB
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Re: Wisconsin

Post by MarySB » Fri Mar 11, 2011 12:40 am

I am a retired teacher from the state of Alabama.  Thought some of you might be interested in an article published in the Retirement Systems of Alabama's March 2011 newsletter:

The Shameful Attack on Public Employees
(written by Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration)

In 1968, 1300 sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life. Eventually Memphis heard the grievances of its sanitation workers. And in subsequent years millions of public employees across the nation have benefited from the job protections they have earned.

But now the right is going after public employees.

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don't want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they'd like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15% tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

It's far more convenient to go after the people who are doing the public's work---sanitation workers, police officers, teachers, social workers, federal employees---to call them "faceless bureaucrats" and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican's Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that is too big.

Above all, Republicans don't want to have to justify continued tax cuts for the rich. As quietly as possible, they want to make them permanent.

But the right's argument is shot-through with bad data, twisted evidence, and unreported assertions.

They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers. That's untrue when you take account level of education. Matched by education, public sector workers actually earn less than their private-sector counterparts.

The Republican trick is to compare apples with oranges---the average wage of public employees with the average wage of all private-sector employees. But only 23% of private-sector employees have college degrees; 48% of government workers do. Teachers, social workers, public lawyers who bring companies to justice, government accountants who try to make sure money is spent as it should be---all need at least four years of college.

Compare apples to apples and you'd see that over the last fifteen years the pay of public-sector workers has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education. Public-sector workers now earn 11% less than comparable workers in the private sector, and local workers 12% less. (Even if you include health and retirement benefits, government employees still earn less than their private-sector counterparts with similar educations.)

Here's another whopper. Republicans say public-sector pensions are crippling the nation. They say politicians have given in to the demands of public unions who want only to fatten their members' retirement benefits without the public noticing. They charge that public-employee pensions are out of control.

Some reforms do need to be made. Loopholes that allow public-sector workers to "spike" their final salaries in order to get final annuities must be closed. And no retired public employee should be allowed to "double dip", collecting more than one public pension.

But these are the exceptions. Most public employees don't have generous pensions. After a career with annual pay averaging less than $45000, the typical employee receives a pension of $19000 a year. Few would call that overly generous.

And most of that $19000 isn't even on taxpayers' shoulders. While they are working, most public employees contribute a portion of their salaries into their pension plans. Taxpayers are directly responsible for only about 14% of public retirement benefits. Remember also that many public workers aren't covered by Social Security, so the government isn't contributing 6.25% of their pay into the Social Security fund as private employers would.

Yes, there is cause for concern about unfunded pension liabilities in future years. They're way too big. But it's much the same in the private sector. The main reason for underfunded pensions in both public and private sectors is investment losses that occurred during the Great Recession. Before then, public pension funds had an average of 86% of all the assets they needed to pay for future benefits---better than many private pension plans.

The solution is no less to slash public pensions than it is to slash private ones. It's for all employers to fully fund their pension plans.

The final Republican canard is that bargaining rights for public employees have caused state budgets to explode. In fact there's no relationship between states whose employees have bargaining rights and states with big deficits. Some states that deny their employees bargaining rights---Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona, for example, are running deficits of over30% of spending. Many that have bargaining rights---Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Montana---have small deficits of less than 10%.

Public employees should have the right to bargain for better wages and working conditions, just like all employees do. They shouldn't have the right to strike if striking would imperil the public, but they should at least have a voice. They often know more about whether public programs are working, or how to make them work better, than political appointees who hold their offices for only a few years.

Don't get me wrong. When times are tough, public employees should have to make the same sacrifices as everyone else. And they are right now. Pay has been frozen for federal workers and for many state workers across the country as well.

But isn't it curious that when it comes to sacrifice, Republicans don't include the richest people in America? To the contrary, they insist the rich should sacrifice even less, enjoying even larger tax cuts that expand public-sector deficits. That means fewer public services, and even more pressure on the wages and benefits of public employees.

It's only average workers---both in the public and private sectors---who are being called upon to sacrifice.

This is what the current Republican attack on public-sector workers is really all about. Their version of class warfare is to pit private-sector workers against public servants. They'd rather set average working people against one another---comparing one group's modest incomes and benefits with another group's modest incomes and benefits---than have Americans see that the top 1% is now raking in a bigger share of national income than at any time since 1928, and paying tax at a lower tax rate. And Republicans would rather you didn't know they want to cut taxes on the rich even more.
fnord123
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Re: Wisconsin

Post by fnord123 » Fri Mar 11, 2011 10:24 am

The first several paragraphs all complain about CEO pay and are misleading.  CEO pay may be an issue, but it has almost nothing to do with state and local employee union compensation and benefits.  Ditto for hedge fund managers usage of carried interest to avoid paying income tax rats.  Even if one fixed all these things, it would make a tiny dent in the state and municipal deficits.  The "deflect attention" here is by the writer of the article - they are talking about a completely different and unrelated problem.  

As for public sector employees being less well paid based on education level, there are questions about that.  Anecdotally, almost every teacher I know received a degree in the humanities or social sciences.  Conversely, most of the people I know who received degrees in engineering or the hard sciences went into the private sector.  If you compare the salaries of the PhDs, MS, and BS that I know, the private sector people do indeed earn more - but they also picked disciplines that pay more in general.  The humanities folks I know who did end up in the private sector earn a lot less than the engineers, for instance.  Furthermore, if you look at productivity data, private sector employees worked an average of 2,050 hours in 2008, 12 percent more than the 1,825 hours worked by the average public-sector employee.

Finally, the article by Reich doesn't address some fundamental points about public sector unions:
  • Unions were created to protect against greedy capitalist bosses who were exploiting workers to maximize profits - but in the case of the public sector, the boss isn't a capitalist trying to maximize profits, so why do we need a union?
  • Many public sector unions have pushed crazy work rules like seniority/tenure.  E.g. given a young energetic teacher with great reviews and a more senior teacher who everyone agrees is incompetent, unions require we fire the young energetic teacher.  Note that this isn't just a "nasty Republican" thing - the liberal Democrat mayor of LA wants to change this too: http://www.npr.org/2011/02/11/133684819 ... m-Reviewed
The article closes with another call for more taxes for the rich - which again is a totally unrelated issue.  Even if we do raise taxes on the rich, it still doesn't address the issues with public sector unions.
Last edited by fnord123 on Fri Mar 11, 2011 1:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
fnord123
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Re: Wisconsin

Post by fnord123 » Fri Mar 11, 2011 10:54 am

Other things Reich said that were misleading:
  • He claims $19K pension is not generous - most private sector employees have ZERO pension - they are on 401K programs.  $19K, even if the figure is correct, is generous compared to $0.
  • Public sector pension funds are less underfunded than private - Again, most private workers do not have pension funds, so comparing underfunding isn't a good comparison
  • Reich mentions that public employees don't get social security - but omits the fact that they don't pay into it, saving them ~6% of their salary
Last edited by fnord123 on Fri Mar 11, 2011 10:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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