Unions Suffer Deathblow after Wisconsin Supreme Court Ruling

[Peach]

In 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed Act 10, a law effectively ending collective bargaining among teachers unions there. It gave rise to massive protests, recall elections, teacher strikes and Democratic State Senators abandoning their posts during the bill's passage. Today, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 5-2 to uphold Act 10 in it's entirety, effectively ending the fight that began three years ago.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the 2011 law that effectively ended collective bargaining for most public workers, sparked massive protests and led to Republican Gov. Scott Walker's recall election and rise to national prominence.


The 5-2 ruling upholds the signature policy achievement of Walker in its entirety and is a major victory for the potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate, who is seeking re-election this year.


The ruling also marks the end of the three-year legal fight over the union rights law, which prohibits public worker unions from collectively bargaining for anything beyond base wage increases based on inflation. A federal appeals court twice upheld the law as constitutional.


"No matter the limitations or 'burdens' a legislative enactment places on the collective bargaining process, collective bargaining remains a creation of legislative grace and not constitutional obligation," Justice Michael Gableman wrote for the majority.


The high court ruled in a lawsuit filed by the Madison teachers union and a union representing Milwaukee public workers. They had argued that the law, which came to be known as Act 10, violated workers' constitutional rights to free assembly and equal protection.


The law also requires public employees to contribute more toward their health insurance and pension costs. In a two-sentence statement Walker issued Thursday, he praised the ruling and claimed the law has saved taxpayers more than $3 billion — mostly attributable to schools and local governments saving more money because of the higher contributions.


"Today's ruling is a victory for those hard-working taxpayers," Walker said.

Wisconsin Supreme Court upholds 2011 union law

Too bad. Corporations and billionaires have the supreme court and most politicians (including scott walker) as their trade unions. But teachers? Hell no.

Attorneys do, physicians also.....but Walker wants to eliminate those who work for low pay, long hours, and of course those who perform manuel labor. A politician of the lowest degree.

 

[kiwiman127]

Middle class income shrinking with declining union membership. That's a classic case of a correlation not based on causation. Some factor is acting on both. What, oh what, could that factor be? Labor surpluses in the labor market. What's causing labor surpluses and the resulting increased returns to capital? This:

Thank you for your response.
Here's an interesting piece I'm sure you'd like to digest:
Unions, inequality, and faltering middle-class wages
Unions, inequality, and faltering middle-class wages | Economic Policy Institute

Yeah, here's their mission statement:

EPI believes every working person deserves a good job with fair pay, affordable health care, and retirement security. To achieve this goal, EPI conducts research and analysis on the economic status of working America. EPI proposes public policies that protect and improve the economic conditions of low- and middle-income workers and assesses policies with respect to how they affect those workers.

That's advocacy, not research.

Still waiting for your explanation of what the graph you posted means.

Rabbi, why not dispute this article piece by piece? Oh that's right, you are to ignorant so you demonize EPI, which the GOP controlled Congress has invited on several occasions to testify on different economic matters.
Just keep on being lame.
Secondly, I wasn't addressing you, I was addressing Rikurzhen, who is obviously out of your league as being an intelligent poster.
Rabbi, when you start answering questions with facts, backing your own comments with something solid and start acting like an adult, I'll pay attention to you. Until then, go play with the other little tykes.

 

[SuMar]

In 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed Act 10, a law effectively ending collective bargaining among teachers unions there. It gave rise to massive protests, recall elections, teacher strikes and Democratic State Senators abandoning their posts during the bill's passage. Today, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 5-2 to uphold Act 10 in it's entirety, effectively ending the fight that began three years ago.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the 2011 law that effectively ended collective bargaining for most public workers, sparked massive protests and led to Republican Gov. Scott Walker's recall election and rise to national prominence.


The 5-2 ruling upholds the signature policy achievement of Walker in its entirety and is a major victory for the potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate, who is seeking re-election this year.


The ruling also marks the end of the three-year legal fight over the union rights law, which prohibits public worker unions from collectively bargaining for anything beyond base wage increases based on inflation. A federal appeals court twice upheld the law as constitutional.


"No matter the limitations or 'burdens' a legislative enactment places on the collective bargaining process, collective bargaining remains a creation of legislative grace and not constitutional obligation," Justice Michael Gableman wrote for the majority.


The high court ruled in a lawsuit filed by the Madison teachers union and a union representing Milwaukee public workers. They had argued that the law, which came to be known as Act 10, violated workers' constitutional rights to free assembly and equal protection.


The law also requires public employees to contribute more toward their health insurance and pension costs. In a two-sentence statement Walker issued Thursday, he praised the ruling and claimed the law has saved taxpayers more than $3 billion — mostly attributable to schools and local governments saving more money because of the higher contributions.


"Today's ruling is a victory for those hard-working taxpayers," Walker said.

Wisconsin Supreme Court upholds 2011 union law

Another Supreme Court win!!!

 

[DigitalDrifter]

The best thing that could happen to all taxpayers in any state would be the end of public employee unions. Unions have no business being involved with tax payer money, and the workers should be directly accountable to the people that pay their salaries.

 

[DigitalDrifter]

And by the way, Wisconsin continues to be a great story. If only all states were ran by governors like Scott Walker.

 

[Vigilante]

 

[SuMar]

Union corruption all around...

 

[Rikurzhen]

Thank you for your response.
Here's an interesting piece I'm sure you'd like to digest:
Unions, inequality, and faltering middle-class wages
Unions, inequality, and faltering middle-class wages | Economic Policy Institute

OK, I read your article. It suffers from some serous shortcomings. It models a closed system, a static system.

The biggest flaw is that it pays no attention at all to what happened to the labor supply with the opening of the immigration pipeline in 1965. Zilch. The previous 40+ years had seen that pipeline closed. Everyone is harking back to those days, the high tide of the union movement.

Unionization is a powerful agent when it operates in a tight labor market because unions work as a huge multiplier in boosting labor negotiating power against capital and capital doesn't have any replacement labor easily available and, this is important too, other employers are facing the same constraints. Open and aggressive immigration completely undermines those conditions. It's no freaking secret that the union leaders of that era, like Gompers, were the movers and shakers behind immigration restriction. They understood perfectly well what happens when the labor market has to find room for hundreds of thousands to millions of new immigrant workers - that weakens the power of labor.

This analysis ignores all of that and then tries to present a case for unionization. That's on the same level of insanity as an article talking about how to have a child and completely omitting the instructions on having sex.

Unions are effective at exploiting conditions and taking a piece of hide out of the employer. For them to do that they need the right environment. A labor market which has millions upon millions of unemployed and discouraged workers deprives a union of leverage.

There were a few interesting tidbits in that article, facts that all of us know but which we rarely see documented. Like this bit:

Sizable differences exist in union wage premiums across demographic groups, with blacks and Hispanics having union premiums of 17.3 percent and 23.1 per*cent, respectively, far higher than the 10.9 percent union premium for whites. Consequently, unions raise the wages of minorities more than of whites (the wage effect of unionism on a group is calculated as the unionism rate times the union premium), helping to close racial/ethnic wage gaps. Hispanic and black men tend to reap the greatest wage advantage from unionism, though minority women have substantially higher union premiums than their white counterparts. Unionized Asians have a wage premium somewhat higher than that of whites.

Unionized immigrant male workers obtain a premium comparable to that of male workers overall, whether they have immigrated relatively recently (within 10 years) or further back in time. Women who have immigrated recently have a higher union premium than women overall, 16.2 percent versus 9.1 percent. Im*migrant women who have been in the United States more than 10 years have a union premium comparable to that of women overall.​

Unions tend to help the least deserving and do least for the most capable. It's startling to see a leftist outfit like EPI actually acknowledge that.

Numerous studies have documented that wage discrimination against blacks ended back in the 1970s. Differing wages reflect differing human capital endowments. A white man and a black man with identical human capital endowments earn exactly the same income in a particular job. That blacks and Hispanics are earning more than whites when they join a union really highlights the UNEARNED PREMIUM that is directed at them. Same with a new immigrant. The gains are greater to the newcomer to America than the person born here.

What the analysis also doesn't address is the changing nature of the economy. In earlier eras when unions were more prevalent, menial labor was also more common. As the economy has grown in sophistication so too have opportunities for higher pay premiums to those with the smarts to do the new jobs. This has resulted in a commodification of menial labor. Some menial jobs in earlier eras could put the worker into the middle class. No longer. You can actually see this today when you look at jobs like meat cutters. Remember Paulie in the Rocky movies? Same with roofing, construction, bricklaying, etc. Most of these jobs are now being done by immigrants. Why? Because the barrier to entry is very low. You don't need a whole lot of skill and you don't need to speak English. On top of this add the oversupply of labor and the result is decreasing wages and people falling out of the middle class. Unionization doesn't solve the problem. If you want to push these jobs back towards middle class then you need to dry up the labor supply.

Look, that article had a number of flaws. It's not good public policy analysis for one simple reason - if they don't understand the problem that they're analyzing, then any solution offered to address the problem is going to be wrong. They don't understand the problem and they show this to us by completely ignoring the abundant inflow of labor via immigration. Allowing for a few years for the 1965 reforms to ramp up and we're right at the point, early 1970s, when union economists always point to as the start of the big decline. Look back on the graphs I posted. After 1965 matters started really improving for Capital because the bargaining power of labor continued to fall, year after year, as the presence of immigrants flooded the labor markets.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Samuel Gompers, founder and president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and himself an immigrant. From a letter to Congress dated March 19, 1924:

"America must not be overwhelmed.

"Every effort to enact immigration legislation must expect to meet a number of hostile forces and, in particular, two hostile forces of considerable strength.

"One of these is composed of corporation employers who desire to employ physical strength (broad backs) at the lowest possible wage and who prefer a rapidly revolving labor supply at low wages to a regular supply of American wage earners at fair wages.

"The other is composed of racial roups in the United States who oppose all restrictive legislation because they want the doors left open for an influx of their countrymen regardless of the menace to the people of their adopted country.'​

César Chavez on immigration:

“He had very strong feelings about undocumented immigrants,” Pawel said.

“He launched the ‘Illegals Campaign’ in 1974, it was in the context of strike breakers and easy availability of people who were brought across the border [by U.S. employers] to replace striking workers.”

Chavez’s cousin, Manuel, started what was known as the “wet line,” a series of tents along a 25-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexican border along Arizona where some 300 members of what was then the United Farm Workers Union patrolled – to keep would-be border crossers out.

“Ostensibly, the ‘wet line’ existed to strengthen a citrus strike in the Yuma lemon groves by convincing Mexicans who might work as scabs to turn around and stay home,” Pawel wrote in her book.

But the patrols went beyond just monitoring the border for people who might be crossing illegally to replace striking workers, Pawel said.

“Stories had begun to surface about widespread violence and beatings along the ‘wet line,’” she said. There were also many reports, she said, of UFW members stealing from people crossing the border.

Pawel said that when confronted at the time about the reports of abuse by ‘wet line’ patrols, Cesar Chavez denied knowing about it or condoning it.

But, she wrote, “the willingness of illegal immigrants to voluntarily report crimes to U.S. authorities, generally unsympathetic to the migrants’ status, reflected the severity of the violence.”

A judge who sentenced two UFW members to probation said: “There is no justification for stopping these people, robbing them, beating them and throwing them back across the line,” Pawel wrote in her new book.

Pawel and others say that Cesar Chavez did direct union members to seek out suspected undocumented immigrants and report them to immigration officials.

“They found workers in fields all over Fresno” for instance, she said, “and reported them to [immigration officials].

Chavez granted an interview to KQED, the National Public Radio station in San Francisco, in which he expressed his disapproval of “wetbacks” who worked as scabs, and undermined U.S. workers.

Many unions, in fact, had strong objections to undocumented immigrants, seeing them as threats to American workers and their organizing efforts. Later, when their memberships began dwindling, they grew more supportive of immigration, and now many unions are at the forefront of pushing for laws that would help legalize undocumented workers.​

 

[EconChick]

In 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed Act 10, a law effectively ending collective bargaining among teachers unions there. It gave rise to massive protests, recall elections, teacher strikes and Democratic State Senators abandoning their posts during the bill's passage. Today, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 5-2 to uphold Act 10 in it's entirety, effectively ending the fight that began three years ago.

Wisconsin Supreme Court upholds 2011 union law

Too bad. Corporations and billionaires have the supreme court and most politicians (including scott walker) as their trade unions. But teachers? Hell no.

Oh nice pictures, Vigilante!

I will definitely recycle

 

[EconChick]

Unions have no place in government. Corruption is the result, not education.

Bumper sticker right there.

 

[Bush92]

Government unions protect the lame, lazy, and non-productive that are being paid by ME. Calvin Coolidge said: "You cannot strike against the common good."

 

[ScienceRocks]

The robber barons are licking their lips! Fuck the worker they scream!

 

[EconChick]

American workers get screwed and the 'I've got mine, so fuck everyone else' sociopaths do the happy dance. People ask what's wrong with America? We now have the answer.

Yes! Thats why we need to get rid of the unions now! THank you Nonepercenter. Unions grab all tbe pay for themselves and let everyone else starve. First sensible thing you've posted on here.

How can you even understand what her point is, Rabbi? I'm impressed. I on the other hand shake my head every time I see her posts because her points are so unclear.

 

[Bush92]

The robber barons are licking their lips! Fuck the worker they scream!

Robber barons is a misstatement, for they were neither "robbers" nor "barons." But the were entrepreneurs who risked their own venture capital to make a profit, and in return stimulated the economy and gave us all good products and a higher standard of living.

 

[EconChick]

American workers get screwed and the 'I've got mine, so fuck everyone else' sociopaths do the happy dance. People ask what's wrong with America? We now have the answer.

"I've got mine, so fuck everyone else" is the union motto.

Ain't that the fucking truth.

 

[EconChick]

Government unions protect the lame, lazy, and non-productive that are being paid by ME. Calvin Coolidge said: "You cannot strike against the common good."

92, how DARE you put Capitalism in a positive light you bourgeois Capitalist Pig.

(That's my Twitter handle actually....Capitalist Pig, LOL...or close enough)

 

[Bush92]

American workers get screwed and the 'I've got mine, so fuck everyone else' sociopaths do the happy dance. People ask what's wrong with America? We now have the answer.

How are American workers being screwed? They get paid. Live in nation with a high standard of living. Especially government workers.

 

[Bush92]

Government unions protect the lame, lazy, and non-productive that are being paid by ME. Calvin Coolidge said: "You cannot strike against the common good."

92, how DARE you put Capitalism in a positive light you bourgeois Capitalist Pig.

(That's my Twitter handle actually....Capitalist Pig, LOL...or close enough)

Always got a kick out of Wall Street protesters who would walk to Starbucks for a $7.00 latte in order to take a break from all that capitalism bashing.

 

[EconChick]

Government unions protect the lame, lazy, and non-productive that are being paid by ME. Calvin Coolidge said: "You cannot strike against the common good."

92, how DARE you put Capitalism in a positive light you bourgeois Capitalist Pig.

(That's my Twitter handle actually....Capitalist Pig, LOL...or close enough)

Always got a kick out of Wall Street protesters who would walk to Starbucks for a $7.00 latte in order to take a break from all that capitalism bashing.

Yeppppppppp.