Scott Walker: Turning public employees into the working poor
Submitted by Man MKE on Mon, 02/24/2014 - 9:29am
In a well-rounded New York Times report on the impact of 2011 Wisconsin Act 10, readers this weekend learned all about the aftermath and hidden effects of Scott Walker's near-total dismantling of collective bargaining for public employees in Wisconsin. But readers had to wait until the penultimate paragraph to read just how insidiously political yet awesomely policy-deficient this governor has been, despite Walker's insistence that his top priority is to create jobs. Leah Lipska, president of AFSCME Local 1 in Madison and an IT worker for the state corrections department, pinned down the doubly destructive power of Walker's law. Read it and weep:
... Ms. Lipska, however, just can’t fathom that there will be much union political activism in November. Workers are worn down, she said, having lost the legislative battle in 2011 and then the attempt to oust Mr. Walker in the 2012 recall vote. Not only that, many government workers have been forced to take second jobs, said Ms. Lipska, who moonlighted for several months as a $9.50-an-hour shift manager at Rocky Rococo, an Italian restaurant.
As the Times story noted earlier, Lipska and her family are now also collecting food stamps -- a program that itself was just cut, thanks to heavyweight politics by some of Walker's Republican buddies in Washington.
Welcome to Walker's Wisconsin and our new economic middle class, which increasingly bears similarity to "Les Miserables." And yet news pundits, business owners and too many voters still have trouble figuring out why the state is lagging so badly in the national economic recovery. It's simple: Most of us have a lot fewer dollars coming in, and Walker's policies have made that disparity worse for a significant proportion of the state's workforce.
If you're a computer technician, a school teacher or other state or local government employee in Wisconsin (excluding, of course, Walker's friends in law enforcement) you now sometimes are driven to hold down two jobs, just to make ends meet. Which means Walker's policies effectively are not just reducing income and spending power for hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin workers, but also reducing the number of available jobs in the state.
Furthermore, that passage puts the lie to conservative claims that raising the minimum wage will only benefit teenagers. Actually, it will benefit an increasing number of citizens, including Wisconsin public employees who are desperate to recover the double-digit wage and benefit cuts they've been handed by Walker and his GOP colleagues.
Some economic progress. Even Ronald Reagan knew better.
http://uppitywis.org/blogarticle/scott-walker-turning-public-employees-working-poor
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