AP via Washington Post (June15,2k11)

Wis. state workers to begin paying more for benefits in Aug., new lawsuit filed over union law

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By Associated Press, Published: June 15

MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin state employees will start paying more for their health care and pension benefits in late August, state officials said Wednesday as a coalition of unions filed a new lawsuit against the GOP-supported plan that strips away collective bargaining rights from most public workers.

The announcement came a day after the state Supreme Court ruled that a lower court judge overstepped her authority when she voided the governor’s polarizing plan to prohibit workers from collectively bargaining over anything except base pay increases no greater than inflation. Local police, firefighters and state patrol are exempt.

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( Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Tom Lynn / Associated Press ) - Singing “solidarity forever” and holding their fists in the air inside of the Wisconsin State Capital in Madison, Wis., union members protest the budget repair bill Tuesday, June 14, 2011.

The law also requires workers to pay 12 percent of their health insurance costs and 5.8 percent of their pension costs, which amount to an 8 percent pay cut on average.

The Supreme Court’s ruling was a major victory for Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who said the law was needed to help address the state’s $3.6 billion budget shortfall. His proposal — which drew tens of thousands of demonstrators to the state Capitol for weeks earlier this year — thrust Wisconsin to the forefront of a national debate over labor rights.

But the legal battle was not yet over. A coalition of unions filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday arguing that the law violated the U.S. Constitution by taking away union rights to bargain, organize and associate and illegally discriminates among classes of public employees. The lawsuit seeks to block portions of the law taking away collective bargaining rights, but allows the higher pension and health care contributions that the unions agreed to take to move forward.

“Scott Walker has created two classes of public sector workers and that is unconstitutional,” said Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Phil Neuenfeldt. “When a legislature discriminates among classes of workers, especially when doing so has more to do with political payback than with any legitimate reasoning, the law has been violated.”

State Department of Justice spokesman Steven Means said he had not seen the lawsuit yet and had no immediate comment. But Walker told reporters the Supreme Court’s decision provided closure and allowed the state to move forward.

Read more of this important news report in WaPo.

-- WaPo materials re-posted by EconoMix

EconomicsUSA: Communications: Naomi Klein, a Canadian, has exported her extremism to the news outlets of American Left

Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report (Mar9,2k11).

Extreme leftist praises Greece's widespread but equally extreme left slogan "We won't pay for your crisis" and jumps from falsifying and ideologizing to the extreme what's happening in Wisconsin.  We drew our conclusions, always tentative, about the Wisconsin particulars earlier today.  We did not have a grand récit poking out from our mundane news reporting and analyzing,  only a local story and its significance primarily in that locality.   Besides,  postmoderism has said grand stories are dead (Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge commissioned by the

                  

Quebecois govt in a Canadian province) -- but it ain't so -- neither in the case of dyed-in-the-wool Marxists like Klein, nor in the case of those who try to follow the Christian Scriptures, the scope of which is a veritable transhistorical story of the coming of the Kingdom of God.  Still, we weren't trying in the previous blog-entry to fit our perceptions of the Wisconsin local developments into our Biblically-based transhistorical horizon of hope and its narrative.  Yet, Klein is doing such "fitting," whole hog.  The video is long.  But sample it; and, if you can spare the time, even later on, view it thru to get a feel for what she erases so smoothly.   She's trying to set us up for her desire to legitimate Greek Riots whenever left-side demonstrations take place in America, shoud they occur in Madison, Wisconsin or in San Fransisco, California -- the rather anarchist terrorism that brawt Greece to a halt, after overspending itself into the depths of 'sovereign debt' and now being bailed out by the EU countries' taxpayers.

She blames what she calls "the shock doctrine" in her bestselling book of that title, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism; it's ultimately a conspiracy theory.  Notice where she positions herself -- on the normative Left, not the extreme -- thus placing Obama in "the center" not the Left, a self-positioning which tells us she's in denial not only about herself, but also about Obama and about how public-employee unions have had a free ride for too long.  She oozes more than charm, if that's what you'd call it.  She speaks of "the pretext of crisis."  She correctly says that the teachers unions are, at the moment,  getting the brunt of the recoil from  previous decades when they made their stealthy gains at taxpayers expense, because they constantly threatened the public with strikes in order to bloat their pay and benefits, and protect the drones droning in the classrooms, elbowing good teachers out of the profession to permanentize the lousy teachers who can't be removed as a result of teacher's unions "collective bargaining rights."  Her simplistic characterization of the 2008 Meltdown according to which the capitalists on Wall Street are all bad and were the only factor in the financial crisis, is indiscriminating and cloying.  There certainly were seriously fast and loose greedsters, in some places on Wall Street (they shoud be in jail on Rykers Island), but she paints with such a broad brush that her conspiracy theory takes over her discourse and drives her into the mud-dled concepts she deftly smooths out.  A sad chapter in the book of her life, this Canuck now making it big on the American extreme left by writing Marxist smoothies for lefty consumers.



Hat Tip to Steve Bishop for pointing me to the video.  I alone am responsible for my refWrite comments / editorial here.

-- Politicarp

USA: Labor: Job Insurance gained by unions asking less in wages

Unions Yield on Wage Scales 

to Preserve Jobs

By LOUIS UCHITELLE

Published: November 19, 2010

MILWAUKEE — Organized labor appears to be losing an important battle in the Great Recession.

Enlarge This Image

Gary Tramontina for The New York Times

Matthew Levatich, president of Harley-Davidson, left, and Bill Peek, owner of Heart of Dixie Harley-Davidson in Pelham, Ala.

Enlarge This Image

Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

Mike Masik Sr., president of United Steelworkers local 2-209.

Even at manufacturing companies that are profitable, union workers are reluctantly agreeing to tiered contracts that create two levels of pay.

In years past, two-tiered systems were used to drive down costs in hard times, but mainly at companies already in trouble. And those arrangements, at the insistence of the unions, were designed, in most cases, to expire in a few years.

Now, the managers of some marquee companies are aiming to make this concession permanent. If they are successful, their contracts could become blueprints for other companies in other cities, extending a wage system that would be a startling retreat for labor.

New York T+mz (Nov19,2k10)

Picture at top: some employers who make motorsc+clz; 2nd pix, the Wisconsin-based union leader in the motorc+cl manufacturing industry.

Read more ....

-- Politicarp posting lead-in to Uchitelle's article