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Title: 54% of WI AFSCME employees voted with their feet in 2011.
Source:
RS.com
URL Source: http://www.redstate.com/moe_lane/20 ... h-their-feet-in-2011-wirecall/
Published: Jun 1, 2012
Author: Moe Lane
Post Date: 2012-06-01 06:51:07 by CZ82
Keywords: None
Views: 2584
Comments: 8
54% of WI AFSCME employees voted with their feet in 2011. Posted by Moe Lane (Diary) Thursday, May 31st at 9:30AM EDT I am going to try to avoid too much hyperbole and sarcasm for this one; this is one time where the situation requires neither. When Scott Walker and other Republicans instituted labor union reforms in 2009, one of the basic planks of such reforms – the one that was quietly and viciously fought, tooth and nail, by the unions – was removal of mandatory dues collection for public sector union employees. In fact, from the union leaderships’ point of view this was THE reform that needed to be killed; if the Republicans had compromised on it then there probably wouldn’t have been a Wisconsin recall movement at all. But Walker and the Republicans didn’t compromise… and what was the result? DOOM. Wisconsin membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees-the state’s second-largest public-sector union after the National Education Association, which represents teachers-fell to 28,745 in February 2012 from 62,818 in March 2011, according to a person who has viewed Afscme’s figures. A spokesman for Afscme declined to comment. This should shock nobody, but it will undoubtedly surprise people anyway. Particularly, say, The American Prospect also made this stunning tacit admission of epistemic closure: “Public Policy Polling numbers showed that 39 percent of union households still plan to vote for Scott Walker. That’s a stunning number given Walker’s anti-union stance (most recently highlighted in his ambiguous support for “right-to-work” laws).” I would suggest that it is not a stunning number; merely one that reflects the reality that mandatory participation in a labor union does not change your politics or your opinions. It merely stifles contrary opinion. Well – more accurately, it masks it. To give a deliberately obnoxious, yet essentially accurate, example (which violates my no-hyperbole promise: sorry about that): if you went by official records and elections then the inhabitants of the old East German regime just loved them some Marxist puppet-state style government. And this remained self-evidently true right up to the second when the East Germans realized that their ‘government’ wasn’t going to shoot them if they went over the Berlin Wall. Whereupon the East Germans proceeded to do just that, and come back with jackhammers and demolition equipment to make it easier for everybody else to flee. Because you can’t make people stop thinking stuff just by banning their ability to effectively say it. So it’s not so bad for AFSCME, really. At least they don’t have to watch their entire political and economic philosophy/worldview/religion get turned into a Pepsi commercial*. Moe Lane (crosspost) PS: AFSCME no longer speaks for Wisconsin public employees, by the way. It only speaks for about half of them. They need to recalibrate their rhetoric accordingly. *…CAPITALISM IS AWESOME. Sorry, just had to get that out of my system.
Poster Comment: Looks like there are a whole lotta people who are glad to be able to be non-union now...... No more paying 5-10% dues to help some pendejo keep his prestige and power when he's doing such a schitty job....
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#1. To: CZ82 (#0)
I'll look for the Milwaukee Journal article earlier this week on the same subject. On a similar note, the WEA's insurance arm has slashed its premiums in order to keep its members in line. Funny stuff. As to when the boy genius Mike Tate will release his findings on the 'John Doe' investigation after Driscoll leaks it to him, I suspect Sunday at the pig roast he is having for Graeme Zilinski and all the Milwaukee cops who don't know the difference between a crushed pelvis and a kick in the balls.
Last I heard, the courts had set aside the provisions that stopped automatic dues deductions. They said that the exemption of police/firefighter unions from the law's provisions amounted to discriminating against some but not all unions. And the decision said that those provisions of the law were entirely legal if WI applied them to all public unions. So the battle is far from over. And the public safety unions, one of the worst abusers of the taxpayer, continue on exactly as before. Lots of other good info on the WI race though.
More on the conflicted reporting on this dues matter. American Thinker, 3/31: Federal Court strikes down a portion of Wisconsin union law But I find other sources (WSJ, 5/31) saying that dues are not being collected as contracts expire and are renewed, just as the original article says. But I can't find any mention that the Obama judge who reinstated the dues deductions was since overruled by an appeals court. Reporting on so many news stories any more is so shoddy that you can't seem to trust the media to collect the actual facts on any story. Look at the media circus they had over the Zimmerman case in FL.
I'm not sure it's so much shoddy as it is selective. It seems most news organizations now report whatever spin their side is releasing instead of actual facts.
"If men through fear, fraud or mistake, should in terms renounce and give up any essential natural right, the eternal law of reason and the great end of society, would absolutely vacate such renunciation; the right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of Man to alienate this gift, and voluntarily become a slave." Samuel Adams, Rights of the Colonists, 1772
Apparently, the appeals court must have overturned the first federal judge. I keep seeing reports that dues are not being collected in WI on new contracts. Hard to believe they can be so incompetent as to completely maul the facts. At least not WSJ on a story like this.
There are a ton of people in this country who are forced into joining unions to work. Working and providing for one's family is a basic human right. The government has no business passing laws that tell people that they can't work if they don't join a union. These forced union laws are the source of the Democrat Party power base. They have to be eliminated.
Ain't that the truth!!
Leftardism/Liberalism: The chickenschitt way to deal with life’s problems by creating solutions to problems that don’t exist, thereby creating a problem where none existed before and then having to find a solution to that one…
Leftardism/Liberalism: The chickenschitt way to deal with life’s problems by creating solutions to problems that don’t exist, thereby creating a problem where none existed before and then having to find a solution to that one…
PS: AFSCME no longer speaks for Wisconsin public employees, by the way. It only speaks for about half of them. They need to recalibrate their rhetoric accordingly.
#2. To: CZ82 (#0)
#3. To: CZ82 (#0)
' "So long as the State of Wisconsin continues to afford ordinary certification and dues deductions to mandatory public safety unions with sweeping bargaining rights, there is no rational basis to deny those rights to voluntary general unions with severely restricted bargaining rights," wrote U.S. District Judge William M. Conley. '
#4. To: TooConservative (#3)
Reporting on so many news stories any more is so shoddy that you can't seem to trust the media to collect the actual facts on any story.
#5. To: We The People (#4)
#6. To: CZ82 (#0)
Public Policy Polling numbers showed that 39 percent of union households still plan to vote for Scott Walker
we must as a species go into a period of shrinkage that we have not experienced since the Dark Ages and the Black Plague -- loonymom
#7. To: TooConservative (#3)
Reporting on so many news stories any more is so shoddy that you can't seem to trust the media to collect the actual facts on any story. Look at the media circus they had over the Zimmerman case in FL.
#8. To: jwpegler (#6)
There are a ton of people in this country who are forced into joining unions to work.
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