What's the Matter with Wisconsin?

I did not understand Wisconsin's vote to keep Walker until this morning. A woman at work remarking about a coworker who had recently been told to pack up his things in a cardboard box and marched off the premises by security--fired--and she was saying what an excellent worker he had been and probably possessed the highest level of sheer talent of anyone at work. But he had obviously offended somebody in administration and he was gone. We all have contracts which say we can be fired at any time for no reason at all. We work at the pleasure of the bosses and the bosses have no mercy. 

She then commented how different our position is from that of the teachers in her town who are public employees, have tenure, recycle the same old lessons year after year and nobody can march any of them out of their offices with their things in cardboard boxes.

What she was saying is: 1. Some of these teachers ought to be fired but cannot be 2. Keeping these particular protected workers injures the rest of us 3. We should have no sympathy for public service employees because they abuse their privileges. She went on to talk about all the policemen and firemen who worked overtime the last few years of their 20 or 30 years because their pensions get inflated by doing so  and they retire at age 50 with an $80,000-150,000 pension and can go out and find another job. And they never went to college--became police or firemen right out of high school at 18 to 20 and after 30 years, they are still only 50. 4. In her town, they cannot fix pot holes because the town is financially strapped paying out 60% of its budget on these inflated pensions for these guys who don't really deserve it.

It reminded me of my father's reaction during a players' strike of the National Football League. "I'm all for the workers," he said. "But these guys are not workers. They are millionaires fighting with billionaires."  

This is the sort of thing the labor unions in Wisconsin were up against: Most citizens have not been able to wrangle such good benefits for themselves and they feel the unions have extracted these sweet deals at our expense. If the unions wrangled sweet deals out of Boeing or Walmart, okay. If the unions wrangle deals that sink the government or General Motors, not so good.

The labor movement has a delicate balancing act here. Traditionally, the only people they had to please was their own membership and their greatest threat and opponents were the bosses with the money, the dogs, the police and the government on their side. Now, the unions have to face the envy, resentment and animosity of the citizen who goes to work every day at the mercy of his boss, who has to watch his step and watch his back and has little to no security and says,  "Why should I pay for such a sweet deal for someone else, when I have to prove my own worth every day?

Of course, it never occurs to the worker to ask why he should have to put up with a contract that says he can be fired without cause.