"Crusaders" Roust Union Occupiers From Rotunda

When the media talks about high school kids at the Wisconsin Capitol, it’s usually been about teachers bringing students to protest Governor Scott Walker and his budget cuts.

We don’t recall seeing nor reading any news coverage of this rather newsworthy story in any of Milwaukee’s news outlets—do you?  Why do you suppose that is? This isn’t merely a local Sheboygan story—not when the story takes place in the State Capitol’s Rotunda. 

In fact the only news outlet we could find that covered this story was Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-op.

On Thursday, March 20, 2012, during a visit to the Capitol, some Wisconsin high school students from Sheboygan Lutheran High School, in town for the state high school basketball playoffs decided to check out the Capitol rotunda.   While there, they witnessed protesters singing about unions and solidarity, so they decided to drown them out with pro-Walker chants.

Read more at Wisconsin Citizens Media Co-op.

FDR's Ghost Is Smiling on Wisconsin's Governor

A history lesson for the Progressives and the public sector union leaders coordinating Governor Walker’s recall effort

Here is an interesting story regarding government unions published in Real Clear Politics on February 19, 2011.

Somewhere, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is grinning past his cigarette holder at Wisconsin's governor. They are on the same page regarding government unions.

Except that Scott Walker -- Republican cheapskate, his visage Hitlerized on signs waved by beet-faced union crowds besieging the Capitol -- is kind of a liberal squish compared to FDR. He's OK with some collective bargaining.  Walker, you might have heard, wants some changes in how Wisconsin deals with unions. He wants state employees to pay 5.8% of their salaries toward their pensions (they pay almost nothing now) and he wants them to cover 12.6% of their health care premiums (their share would go up from $79 a month to about $200; the average private-sector sap pays about $330).

Unions are enraged. They've been calling such increases unspeakable since Walker was elected handily in November. Then, Feb. 10, Walker went further. He'd allow public-sector unions to negotiate only pay, not benefits, mainly because he wants HSA-style health plans and 401(k)-style retirements for state workers, and unions would fight that, tooth and ragged red claw.

So unions erupted. Teachers faked illness in such numbers as to close school districts for days. Mobs beat on the doors of legislative chambers. And in some heavenly Hyde Park, the great liberal god of the 1930s is saying he saw it all along. 

Roosevelt's reign certainly was the bright dawn of modern unionism. The legal and administrative paths that led to 35% of the nation's workforce eventually unionizing by a mid-1950s peak were laid by Roosevelt.

 But only for the private sector. Roosevelt openly opposed bargaining rights for government unions.

"The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees. Yes, public workers may demand fair treatment, wrote Roosevelt. But, he wrote, "I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place" in the public sector. "A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government."  Read full story…