For decades, educators (and other public employees) and their powerful unions have received new contracts with wages and benefits above and beyond the average private sector employee. They basically held school boards and taxpayers hostage with arbitration that always favored the teachers and their unions. For at least the last four decades the teachers unions has reaped handsome rewards. More power to them.
Well, times have changed. For a number of reasons, including the auto industry bailout, the banking industry bailout, the Freddie and Fannie bailout and two wars just to name a few. The country is broke because state and federal government does not know how to manage money. They spend money they don’t have, like an 18 year old with a credit card. The U.S. Government is now over 14 trillion dollars in debt and the economy is still in the tank. The unemployment rate is over 20% in real numbers, since our government does not count those who are still unemployed but no longer collecting unemployment benefits.
The current national debt clock
http://www.ethanpope.com/
Individual states like New Jersey, Arizona, California and Illinois are so broke they can no longer pay their bills. Illinois is now know as a deadbeat state because they don’t have they money to pay their bills. Wisconsin is not far behind.
Here is a real time debt clock for the state of Wisconsin
http://www.usdebtclock.org/state-debt-clocks/state-of-wisconsin-debt-clock.html
So now we finally have a new Governor who realizes, that not only can the state and federal governments can longer continue to tax and spend, but we have to make significant changes in the current system to dig our way out of the mess we are in.
At this point it doesn’t matter who is to blame anymore, we have reached a point where someone has to step up to the plate and say no more. We can’t continue like this. Changes have to be made for the sake of our future, and the future of our children.
Governor Walker is doing just that. He has decided to make serious and obviously unpopular decisions to stop the madness.
While pretty much everyone in the private sector that still has a job is taking pay freezes, pay cuts, concessions in benefits, furlough etc., the teachers are now livid because they are being targeted.
Educators not only receive handsome wages for a 190 (+/-) day work year but currently receive 11% of their annual wages contributed into their retirement fund 100% by taxpayers. Teachers contribute nothing, zip, zero, nada, towards their retirement fund.
There is absolutely no one outside the public sector who receives anything even close to that. Most private employers who do offer retirement plans will only match between 3% to 6% of the employees contribution into a 401k. That means the employee must first contribute to even receive the matching funds.
While most private sector employees are paying several hundred dollars a month towards health insurance, teachers pay little for health insurance coverage for plans that are far better than the coverage non educators receive.
I work for a private company who ranks in the top 100 hundred of the fortune 500 company list. My employer employs tens of thousands of people world wide. For 2011, not only are we receiving little if any pay increase, the company has announced they will be contributing less towards our 401k and we are now paying between 8% to 15% more towards our health insurance premiums each month, depending on the coverage we choose. I believe I fall into the same situation that the vast majority of private sector employees are currently in, if they are even fortunate enough to have any benefits at all.
Governor Walker sees the debt problem, knows we cannot continue on the fiscally irresponsible path, and knows something has to be done and has to be done now.
All he is asking, is for public employees to make the same concessions private sector employees are making. He is not doing it because he wants to, he is doing it because he has to. Jeez, what is so hard to comprehend about that ? The state is broke, the nation is broke. The good times are over and it is time to face the music.
The Antigo school board will begin negotiating a new contract with the Antigo area teachers union, maintenance staff union a support staff union next month, March 2011 for the next contract beginning in July 2011.
C’mon teachers, (and all public employees), stop whining and be thankful for all the good years.
..
Ben, are you actually saying that anything beyond an 8th grade education is unnecessary and frivolous? You are outraged that students would side with their teachers? What freakin’ planet are you from, anyway?
Jerry, the majority of just about any election whether local, state or on a federal level are typically pretty close between the Dems and the Republicans. Some elections are blow outs, but for the most part evenly divided. The party majority tends to sway back and forth just like the Republicans took the last elections. Even Obama said the Dems took a Shellacking in November. There were several state races last November that were almost too close to call right until the last ballot was counted. Agree?
So that means voting adults are fairly evenly split between liberal values and conservative values right?. Dems vs Republicans right ?
Now why is it the vast majority, again, the vast majority of high school and college age students are currently siding with the teachers regarding Walkers reform bill and liberal values?
If our educators were teaching from a neutral platform and sharing an equal amount of time and energy to both the conservative and liberal view points, students could/would make informed decisions on there own and should also be fairly evenly split on their values just like adults right?
If students are significantly leaning towards the left, it is because they are being spoon fed liberal democratic values in school and little if any conservative values right? C’mon, how can the majority of students be liberal thinking in school and then turn evenly divided once out of school and in the real world and voting.
There is no question about it, teachers are apostatizing to their students in class trying to win them over to democratic values. You can’t possibly disagree with that? How else can you explain the huge difference in the percentage of students who are leaning towards the teachers, but adult tax paying voters almost evenly split.
That is exactly why some parents home school their children or send them to parochial schools. It is no different than your chiro mafia trying to convince their students (patients) that a weekly spinal adjustment is the ticket to good health.
Madison School District Rushes to Screw Taxpayers
This is nothing short of dereliction of duty on the part of the Madison School Board.
The Madison School Board scheduled a meeting for 2 p.m. Saturday to approve a deal with its unions before a Republican law to strip collective bargaining takes effect.
The vote is scheduled less than 48 hours after the School District and Madison Teachers Inc. exchanged initial proposals Thursday night at a hastily called School Board meeting.
The two proposals, released by the district Friday afternoon, called for extending contracts until June 30, 2013, and freezing wages, but differed on benefit concessions and other details.
So let’s get this straight… the same union that walked out and shut down the schools for days leaving kids and parents scrambling are to be rewarded by the school board with a sweetheart contract. At the same time, the school board is locking the district into a contract even though it is crystal clear that they will receive substantially less state aid next year and will not be able to raise local taxes to cover the difference. The result? They will have to fire teachers, cut programming, or skimp on something else. Older union teachers win. The kids, taxpayers, and younger teachers who will be fired first lose.
Nice going.
Posted by Owen Robinson – Boots & Sabers
This video is a good example making my point, that some teachers are brain washing innocent children with cult like behavior into the world of liberalism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8BRa9ffT9o
No, no, Ben. You got it the wrong way around. The fact is, only MOST teachers are being objective and rational about teaching their subjects, but a few loose-cannon cases are indoctrinating their students with conservative right-wing quasi-religious crap and should be fired.
Unless, of course, you have a rational, fair, and democratic solution to offer, one that will satisfy everyone…..
Jerry, here is is good editorial published in todays Wausau Daily Herald.
“Who is setting the curriculum for state schools? Assembly Bill 172, signed into law in 2009, states that the state Superintendent of Public Instruction must incorporate the history of organized labor and the collective bargaining process into the model academic standards for social studies. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction then directs schools to three pro-union organizations for lesson planning.
This sounds more like indoctrination than teaching. The law is promoting a special interest.
If schools are going to teach the history of unions, they need to include both sides. They would need to include discussions on why President Franklin Roosevelt was against collective bargaining of public unions and stated that “All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
It would also be appropriate to discuss the Civil Service Reform Act signed into law by Jimmy Carter that does not allow federal workers to bargain for wages or benefits. It would be helpful to look at the bigger picture and discuss the financial problems of numerous states that have negotiated lucrative pension contracts with their state workers.
In the private sector, it would be beneficial to look at companies such as GM where the union contracts and management decisions led to a bailout by the federal government. If the history of unions is going to be discussed, both sides need to be represented, and their effects in today’s economy”.
I will be the FIRST person to admit that I’m not up-to-date on the political side of all of this. However, I am a very driven, intelligent, and focused 20 year old that is going to school and working full-time. I also have an aunt who teaches at AHS. First and foremost, I want to say, what’s wrong with teachers having to pay for health insurance and pension contributions? Everyone should! I currently work a full-time job at the hospital, and if I weren’t on my mom’s insurance, I too, would be paying for health insurance. And the premiums aren’t “cheap,” I’ve looked into it! And I’m already paying pension contributions..at 20 YEARS OLD! I also WORK IN HEALTHCARE and am expected to pay healthcare insurance premiums to receive the hospital’s insurance. The hospital is one of the largest employers in Antigo, and EVERY employee there has to pay to receive their health insurance and they all make pension contributions. So, no, I don’t think that’s ridiculous to ask that of anyone. Secondly, I agree with many of you. When I was a student at AHS 2 years ago, if ANY of the students would have done what the teachers did, there would be SERIOUS consequences. Actually, I do remember a perfect example. “Senior Skip Day.” The day where ALL the seniors prove to the staff that we’re close to doing whatever we want and that we’re almost graduated and responsible for ourselves. My senior year, we were told by staff members that if ANY of us missed school on that day and didn’t have a note from a doctor, that we would be UNABLE TO GRADUATE. Now, it’s the teachers taking a “Teacher Skip Day.” And their behavior is excused. It’s unacceptable. And they aren’t “teachers” in my eyes. Their acting like selfish children. Thirdly, I have read the paper, and seen that several of my ALL TIME FAVORITE TEACHERS have received layoff notifications. I personally, think it’s bull$hit that GREAT teachers jobs are on the line, so that crab a$$ teachers that have taught me NOTHING but have been there 40 years can keep their jobs. It’s wrong. Just like many professions, you’re expected to continuously “re-new” your license and go through testing to make sure that you’re doing your job proficiently. A LOT of the teachers and AHS are not. I can honestly say, that only a handful of teachers from 1st grade all the way to my senior year in high school, have helped form my future. The rest of the learning, was done with ON HAND training and my parents/family(who never once get paid to do their job..) A certain teacher that I had in high school came to school every day, excited to teach her students, not only academically, but emotionally. She truly cared. And she WAS NOT one of the teachers to drive to Madison for pointless protesting the day every other teacher did. She went to school that morning, with a smile on her face, knowing she couldn’t control the situation. She received her layoff notification about a week ago. Does anyone else see the problem with that?!
Ben, I have long (many years, many venues) maintained that the Wisconsin state legislature is the largest collection of unpurposed, unprincipled, short-sighted ignoramuses in the United States. Nothing they do surprises my capacity for recognizing stupidity. Non-educators attempting to define school curricula is yet another example of stupidity over-reaching the bounds of capability.
By the way, the piece you quote is a Letter to the Editor, not an editorial. You may have been misled by the Antigo Daily Journal’s habit of printing letters to the editor where newspaper readers usually expect to see editorials, but I’m not sure that applies to the Wausau Daily Herald. There are other differences. The Herald, for instance, respects grammar and logic in its staff-written stories, and the ADJ famously does not.
It’s nice Jerry agrees with Ben. Jerry should really run for an elected position.
Analysis shows emails to Walker favored budget repair bill
Gov. Scott Walker was right: The angry crowds in Madison didn’t tell the whole story of how Wisconsinites felt. In the week after Walker announced his plan to dramatically curtail public employees’ collective bargaining rights in the state budget repair bill, a wide majority of the emails to him expressed support, an analysis of those emails indicates.
The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism analyzed a computer-generated random sample of 1,910 emails from the more than 50,000 that flooded Walker’s office in the week after he unveiled his plan on Feb. 11. Nearly all were related to the bill.
Of the emails related to the bill, 62 percent supported it, while 32 percent opposed it. The margin of error for the Center’s sample size is plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.
The percentages are muddied by the fact that some people wrote more than one email — sometimes many more. The Center ran a computer script on the full set of emails and found at least 47,752 unique email addresses. The most prolific person sent at least 252 messages against the bill.
Those percentages align with Walker’s characterization of the emails on Feb. 17, when he told reporters that “the majority are telling us to stay firm, to stay strong, to stand with the taxpayers.”
Franklin noted that the margin is “coincidentally, the inverse of what we saw in the opinion polls” from both conservative and liberal outfits that showed most voters disapproved of Walker’s plan. That’s because far from being a random sample of citizenry, these emails came from people who were motivated to write to Walker.
The nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism collaborates with Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio and the UW-Madison School of Journalism & Mass Communication and other news media.
Monday, March 21, 2011 5:45 am
Meanwhile, Bob, the recall campaigns (on both sides) are mounting. I think the actual numbers from the recall elections will tell the real story. I think it will be closer to to the survey showing that if the governor election were held today, Walker would lose to Barrett by 55 to 45 percent. There are a lot of Dems out there who are quite chagrined by their stay-at-home apathy in the last election. They’ll be at the polls, this time.
Next up, Walker fights the courts to jam his union-busting agenda through. There’s a little problem there with the GOP not playing by the rules. Surprise!
Jerry should really run for an elected position.
Marquette U law professor Rick Esenberg also weighs in Judge’s Sumi’s decision.
Having taken a closer look at the text of Judge Sumi’s decision in Ozanne v. Fitzgerald, I am quite frankly astonished. The court seems to have managed to enjoin publication of the statutory changes in the budget repair bill without addressing any of the difficult issues that the case presents.
First, there is an issue as to whether the case is even ripe for decision. In Goodland v. Zimmerman, 243 Wis. 459, 10 N.W.2d 180 (1943), the Supreme Court held that judges may not enjoin the publication of a law on the basis that it is or might be unconstitutional. A bill, in the Court’s view, is not enacted until it is published such that publication is part of the legislative process with which courts may not interfere. Unless the Court wants to abandon that precedent, I think that it clearly requires that the restraining order be vacated and the case be remanded with instructions to dismiss.
Bob, did you actually read Judge Sumi’s decision? I thought the hold was placed on the basis of failure to follow procedure required for voting a bill into law, not on the constitutionality of the alleged budget repair bill, since the budget repair bill is not even the one under discussion. The GOP sliced union-busting out of the budget bill, remember? Publication of notice can’t really count if public access to the publication board is blocked, as was the Capitol building at the time. It will be very interesting to see how it all works out.
Hey Ben Drinkin, maybe you ought to stop drinkin (Walker’s kool aid). Scott Walker is a lap dog for corporate interests, and any body with half of a brain in their a$$ knows it. Wisconsin had somewhere in the neighborhood of a 53 million dollar surplus for this two year budget period ending June 31, 2011. So what did Scotty do? Why he did what every card carrying republican does. He gave businesses 143 million in tax cuts, and created a budget deficit. Sound familiar? George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus too. And he quickly ran up huge deficits with tax cuts for the rich, and getting us into two wars.
At any rate, Walker created the deficit, and then he turns around and blames those “greedy public employees” for a deficit that he created. Sounds like something Hitler would have done! It is a damn shame that so many people in Northeastern Wisconsin vote Republican, because Republicans don’t care about the poor, the working class, the disabled, or the elderly. All they care about is minimum taxes for the wealthy and businesses and maximum profits.
I don’t blame people for having conservative views, because government shouldn’t regulate everything that we do, and tax us to death. But it damn sure ought to make sure that everyone, including businesses and the wealthy pay their fare share of taxes. It should also have regulations in place that insures our water is safe to drink, our air is safe to breath, workers work in a safe environment, and the toys that we purchase at Walmart are safe for our children and grand children to play with. But guys like Walker want to limit government regulations that do all of these because they eat into corporate profits.
I have a question for you. If Walker is so fiscally responsible, then why did his administration give a $64,000.00 a year job to a 27 year old college drop out, with two drunken driving tickets, and no management experience? This same individual was then promoted up to an $84,000,00 a year job. And he beat out a candidate with a PHD, and a candidate with a degree in engineering! This same “fat, drunk, and stupid” individual was recently demoted back to the $64,000.00 a year job because of public uproar over this shameless act. I work for the state. I have a masters degree in education and I earn $52,000.00 a year!
Finally, I noticed that, shortly before every election, one of our counties card carrying republicans writes to the Antigo Daily Journal and tries to explain to people, in what is nothing more than a campaign message packed with half truths, and lies, why it is in our best interest to vote republican. Who cares who has been friends with Prosser for over 20 years. That probably means that they have been in the state republican party together for over 20 years, have cottages on Bass Lake, and golf together. And nothing against our judge or sheriff, but who gives a rats behind who they endorse in an election? Our citizens need to do their own research and vote based on that.