This was the lead story of the evening, even before a report on the Wisconsin recall election which had taken place the previous day. As it turned out, that was just the tip of the iceberg.
During the next 36 hours, opponents of public employees saw their opening and began piling on. The media was filled with stories explaining that the public seems finally to be fed up with the obscene wages and benefits of public employees. I could quote some of them here, but why ruin a perfectly good weekend with depressing drivel.
Readers of this blog already know that when comparing apples to apples, public employees lag their private sector counterparts in both wages and benefits as shown by major university research. That doesn't make any difference. If the big lie is repeated enough, it becomes reality and today, this perceived reality is immune to correction by actual facts. (How many people still believe in "death panels" or that Obama was born in Kenya?)
An article in the McClatchy chain of newspapers gets it almost right:
And that is why we now find ourselves thrown under the proverbial bus. Who threw us there? Our "brothers and sisters" in private sector organized labor. Wisconsin exit polls show that a large number of union members and members of union households supported Walker.
When it comes to public employees, many private sector union members see themselves as our employers rather than as union brothers. Why should they pay higher taxes so that we can have those pensions that they don't have anymore?
This is precisely what Scott Walker was talking about in the famous "divide and conquer" video. For those unfamiliar with it, it shows Walker speaking with a woman who is a billionaire and had given $500,000 to the Walker campaign. This took place in January of 2011, shortly after Walker had taken office.
Remember, this was at a time when the public thought that they had elected a "jobs, jobs, jobs" candidate and Walker hadn't said a word in public about taking away collective bargaining rights.
During the next 36 hours, opponents of public employees saw their opening and began piling on. The media was filled with stories explaining that the public seems finally to be fed up with the obscene wages and benefits of public employees. I could quote some of them here, but why ruin a perfectly good weekend with depressing drivel.
Readers of this blog already know that when comparing apples to apples, public employees lag their private sector counterparts in both wages and benefits as shown by major university research. That doesn't make any difference. If the big lie is repeated enough, it becomes reality and today, this perceived reality is immune to correction by actual facts. (How many people still believe in "death panels" or that Obama was born in Kenya?)
An article in the McClatchy chain of newspapers gets it almost right:
"It’s mainly the benefits that draws budget cutters. Public employees earn about 7 percent less on average than comparably trained, educated and experienced workers in the private sector, studies show."
“It’s in benefits where the pay differences between public- and private-sector employees are the largest,” Biggs [resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute] said. “The salaries are not hugely different. The benefits are.” [Do your research, Mr. Biggs and you will find--as we did--that public sector benefits still lag those in the private sector.]
And as public-sector employees retain more of the benefits that private-sector workers are losing, their compensation packages have come under scrutiny.
“What we find is that pensions, vacations, sick pay, health benefits that many public sector workers have, used to be the norm for most major companies across the country,” Wong [Director of UCLA Center for Labor Research] said. “But with such a steady erosion of those types of benefits, they now seem like the exception rather than the rule.” [Emphasis mine.]
And there, folks, is the crux of the problem. It isn't that public employees have negotiated such gold-plated benefit packages. The problem is that workers in the private sector used to have these benefits too, and gradually lost them as private-sector union membership slipped to 7% of workers. Collective bargaining in the private sector is fast becoming a thing of the past.And that is why we now find ourselves thrown under the proverbial bus. Who threw us there? Our "brothers and sisters" in private sector organized labor. Wisconsin exit polls show that a large number of union members and members of union households supported Walker.
When it comes to public employees, many private sector union members see themselves as our employers rather than as union brothers. Why should they pay higher taxes so that we can have those pensions that they don't have anymore?
This is precisely what Scott Walker was talking about in the famous "divide and conquer" video. For those unfamiliar with it, it shows Walker speaking with a woman who is a billionaire and had given $500,000 to the Walker campaign. This took place in January of 2011, shortly after Walker had taken office.
Remember, this was at a time when the public thought that they had elected a "jobs, jobs, jobs" candidate and Walker hadn't said a word in public about taking away collective bargaining rights.
The "divide and conquer" he speaks of is splitting the public sector unions off from the support of union members in the private sector. Good job, governor.Let's all hold hands as we race to the bottom.
Let me conclude with a couple of quotes from an article in today's Washington Post: "Karen McDonough, who has worked in the city of San Jose’s environmental services department for two decades, said before Tuesday’s vote she tried to change voters’ minds by telling them her version of the story: that she is a hardworking senior employee who had gone years without a pay raise.
“The response I got the most was ‘I don’t get a pension. Why should you?’ ”
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