County, City Workers, Teachers In The Same Sinking Boat

Marketplace has another fine write up on the future of Wisconsin in six days. Translation Scott Walker, the budget and unions.

Isthmus’ David Blaska — that rarest of things, a Dane County conservative — makes a statewide prediction using a Madison example:

Scott Walker is the new CEO of the largest employer in this company town. With the support of a like-minded board of directors, the new governor will have direct control of 30,000 workers in Dane County — and major influence over another 28,000 local government employees.

Those employees will decrease in number and earn significantly less money through cuts in wages and increased contributions to their pensions and health insurance plans. That much is certain.

Not just state workers. County and city government workers are in the same sinking boat. Much of the $4 billion shared revenues collected by the state and distributed to counties and municipalities will be swallowed up by a $3.3 billion deficit. The $12 billion in school aids will take a hit. (Figures are biennial.) The federal bailout of state governments (AKA “the stimulus”), is done and over. Madison, meet Detroit!

"Isthmus writer Marc Eisen explains why the us-vs.-them union mentality is blowing back at unions:

“Public employee unions are suffering from self-inflicted wounds,” says Steve Baas, the government affairs director for the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Commerce. “They’ve resisted the sort of wage and benefit cuts that have become commonplace in the recession-battered private sector.”

And the steep price for this, Baas argues, is political isolation. Taxpayers who’ve endured punishing cuts in their own wages and benefits are beginning to see public employees as “the collective them” and not “the collective us,” he says.

The public’s anger has been fueled by well-publicized excesses: the Madison bus driver earning almost $160,000 in 2009; the state corrections workers milking overtime to double their pay; and the more than 3,000 Milwaukee County employees collecting lucrative lump-sum pension “backdrops,” rising to $1 million apiece for a lucky few.

Nationally, the number of federal employees earning $150,000 or more a year has increased tenfold in the last five years, according to USA Today.

Donald Downs, a UW–Madison political scientist, notes that taxpayers are being asked to support public employees like himself with better benefits, richer retirement plans and sometimes higher salaries than they have.

“The public sector has to be more consonant with what’s going on in the country,” he says. “We’re beginning to look more and more like a privileged caste.”

Mordecai Lee, a UW–Milwaukee political scientist and a former Democratic lawmaker, argues that public employees unions manipulate elected officials through political endorsements and financial contributions. He describes their recent contract concessions as “minor givebacks that are nothing like what the private sector has experienced.”

Government officials are in “a position of total weakness,” says Lee. “I don’t see what leverage management has over public labor unions.”" Marketplace of Ideas Blog

County to city workers, teachers and even school union workers, beware, your in with the rest of em