Fair Compensation

May 10, 2011 By Phil Welles

Why Unions and Collective Bargaining need to be amended in Wisconsin.

When thinking about what is happening in Wisconsin in regards to Unions and Walker’s movement to strip collective bargaining rights from public employees, it’s important to consider about what it is about unions that have prompted this all. For a while now, Unions have had a large hand in creating financial instability on the state and local levels. State Governments can no longer realistically continue to fund public employee benefits without severe consequences. There’s a notion that Unions are downtrodden, struggling to keep wages fair, and to make ends meet. A lot of focus is on the teachers in Wisconsin. The federal government’s national compensation survey estimates that local public school districts pay teachers an average of $47 per hour in total compensation, including $13 per hour in benefits – figures that far outstrip not only what private school teachers earn but also the average of what all professional workers earn in private business, a category that includes engineers, architects, computer scientists, lawyers, and journalists (Shakedown by Steven Malanga, Page 29 - http://bit.ly/faA654). It’s not just the teachers, as a 2005 study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute found, public-sector workers earned 46 percent more in salary and benefits than comparable private-sector workers. That gap has since grown larger: from the first quarter of 2007 through the last quarter of 2009, according Josh Barro of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the average value of hourly compensation (wages plus benefits) rose by 9.8 percent for employees of state and local governments, compared with 6.9 percent in the private sector (Shakedown by Steven Malanga, Page 17 - http://bit.ly/faA654

Is there a political aspect to this? Of course there is. Unions create a vicious cycle of spending that wastes millions of dollars. Union members are forced to pay their dues, which then get funneled into millions of money spent on campaigns of democrats who have promised to continue to raise wages and keep increasing their benefits. TheWisconsin teachers’ union plunked down a state-high $1.5 million for lobbying in Wisconsin’s most recent legislative session (Shakedown by Steven Malanga, Page 27 - http://bit.ly/faA654). You’re left with politicians who are making financial promises because they know that with the lobbying from unions they have a better chance to be elected. We simply can’t afford to mismanage money like this in the current economic climate. President Obama called Walker’s plan an “assault on unions,” which should be noted as ironic considering Obama supports limiting the scope of collective bargaining for federal employees (http://bit.ly/hMJe6W). Workers should have the right to work where they choose, to earn wages that reward them for good work, and don’t reward them when their work is substandard. While Unions lament the decay of the middle and lower class, their mandated wage hikes often eliminate the jobs of low-skilled workers – the very people they are purporting to be supporting. The plan laid about Governor Walker is not an easy one, but it is vital in beginning to fix the hole that Unions have put us in over the years. It may seem drastic to take away collective bargaining, but unless the noxious power of the unions aren’t weakened, nothing will ever change and states like Wisconsin will continue to spiral in debt, and jobs will continue to be lost.

• public unions

• Wisconsin

• Walker

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