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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
If you needed yet another example of why government employees should never be allowed to join unions, this is it. In Racine, Wisconsin the local fireman’s union got into an imbroglio over a July 4th parade float honoring the fallen first responders of the Sept. 11 attacks, a parade entry that the union supported previously. This time, though, union bosses decided not to support this year’s 9/11 memorial float because one of the firemen on the float opted out of the fireman’s union this year.
That’s right, the fireman’s union decided that their union agenda was more important than supporting a memorial to their brethren that died on Sept. 11, 2001. Their union agenda was even more important than patriotism and an Independence Day parade.
Imagine that. These union thugs despoiled the memory of the Sept. 11 fallen and used them in order to make points for their union ideals and political policies.
What could be more disgusting?
The man in the middle is Matt Gorniak, a Milwaukee-area fire lieutenant, who was the driving force behind the 2011 float idea. Naturally, he assumed that his fireman brothers would love to join him to honor those police and firemen that died at the hands of our enemies on Sept. 11. Boy was he wrong. The union took a stand against his float because Gorniak happened to have left the union this year.
Gorniak took advantage of a little used clause in Wisconsin state law that allowed him to opt out of the fireman’s union because he sided against the union’s political agenda. He wasn’t the only one, either. Several firemen joined him in his protest.
But because of Gorniak’s action the union bosses decided to prevent other firemen from joining him on his parade float honoring the 911 fallen.
Gorniak even told the union that he’d step back and allow the union to decide whom to allow on the float but the union turned its back on him anyway. “I was shocked at the response,” Gorniak told reporters.
Gorniak has vowed to carry on with the parade float and has offered an open invitation to any fireman that wants to join him.
Another firefighter that opted out of the union told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he felt a backlash would occur once word got out about what the union was doing.
Mike Gabby told the paper, “I’ve got to think most of the guys would agree with me: This has nothing to do with politics.”
Ah, but when it comes to union thugs there is no memorial, no patriotism, no coming together unless the union agenda is recognized first, foremost, and above everything else.
Like I said, when a union finds its own petty hatreds getting in the way of patriotism, civic duty, and a memorial to the fallen, then that union has lost its legitimacy. But this is just the thing. It is always thus, if you will. Unions don’t care about God, Country, and Community. They care only about unions. And this why it is detrimental to the public safety to allow people whose job it is to save lives to join unions.
You see, as far as union bosses are concerned, union rules, union needs, union desires, toeing the union line all come before public safety and what is best for the people.
Simply put, government employees should never, ever be allowed to have a union. Government unions are antithetical to good government and actually dangerous to public safety. This little tale is just one more example of that.
Kyle Maichle points out today that Wisconsin’s new law kicks in starting today.
“After nearly five months of protests and everything in between, Wisconsin’s new collective bargaining reforms for government employees went into effect today at 12:01 AM CDT. As of today, all government employees must contribute 12% of their salary to their health insurance and 5.6% to their retirement. Also, the only thing that government employees can bargain on is their salaries.
During the nearly five months when SB 11 was stuck in the courts, a good chunk of local government unions including school districts got contract extensions under the old law for up to two years. Yesterday, the unions representing Milwaukee County failed to get a two year extension under the old collective bargaining law. The Chairman of the Milwaukee County Board said that he would not schedule a special session over the union contracts. This was a big defeat for the government employee unions representing Wisconsin’s largest metro area.”
And the gnashing of union teeth has only just begun!
-By Warner Todd Huston
Green Bay TV reported on June 21 that the teachers union in Green Bay, Wisconsin is incensed that the school district is demanding that teachers work an extra half hour a day, making their hours a set 8-hour day, or a 40-hour work week. In turn, this absurd ire displayed by teachers is incensing local Green Bay residents.
“They need to be the professionals that they are supposed to be. They sound like a bunch of idiots and they look like a bunch of idiots, they make the rest of us look bad,” said a listener to the Vicki McKenna Show.
Naturally the teachers union president assumes all you Green Bayers are stupid, that you don’t understand the issues, and says that she won’t listen to her critics, anyway.
In the report, Toni Lardinois, president of Green Bay Teachers Union, threw up the straw man factoid that some teachers voluntarily give 10 and 11 hour days to their job. The proper reply to this factoid is a hearty “so what”?
Yes, it is good that some dedicated teachers, all of whom are on salary, spend more time at work than they are obligated by their contracts. But the fact is they are not obligated to spend more than 7-1/2 hours a day at work. And the target are the many more teachers that give only the bare minimum required. That is what the school board is trying to rectify.
Even so, what is the whining going on here? These taxpayer paid for, government employee teachers are upset that they have to work an 8-hour day like everyone else does? How does that win them any sympathizers in the general public?
Hopefully it won’t. Hopefully, these pampered, highly paid public employees will at least find they have to work the same number of hours that the people paying their salaries have to work!
With some Wisconsin teachers making over $100,000 a year in average annual compensation, one would think they’d be smart enough to keep quite and suffer the small indignities, eh?
It is an amazing amount of money to be spent on a mere state supreme court race but this one was for all the marbles in Wisconsin as far as both sides were concerned, so I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. Wisconsin Democracy Campaign broke out its calculator and came up with a whopping amount of $5.4 million having been spent on the race by forces outside the candidate’s themselves.
“The special interest groups,” WDC says, “spent an estimated $2.7 million to support Prosser and $1.8 million to back Kloppenburg.” Even though two other high court elections outspent the 2011 effort, it is still a major amount of money to go into a state-wide election, to be sure.
I have to say, these final numbers shock me in one respect. I am shocked that unions didn’t put more into this race than they did. The unions sure spent a ton of cash in other areas in the Badger State (like the protests at the state capitol) so maybe they didn’t have the spare cash to throw at Kloppenburg’s race when push came to shove. Whatever the case, I was surprised it wasn’t more.
It’s also interesting that the cash spent on Prosser’s behalf was spent by activists, advocacy groups, and business interests inside the state. The way the left was screaming about Prosser’s support in this race one would have thought that the judge was getting billions from forces outside the state. Remember the screams from the left that the Koch brothers were underwriting Prosser’s race? Turns out not so much.
It turns out that while Prosser and Kloppenburg both received support from outside the state, forces inside the state spent more than those outside.
The biggest single outlay was made by the left-wing “smear group” Greater Wisconsin Committee.
Leading the smear groups was the Greater Wisconsin Committee which spent nearly $1.7 million to support Kloppenburg. The Madison-based group has been a leading spender on outside electioneering activities in most partisan races for statewide office and the legislature and in nonpartisan state Supreme Court races since it was created in 2004 to support Democratic candidates.
Greater Wisconsin sponsored web ads, phone banks and four television ads to support Kloppenburg. One of the group’s worst ads condemned Prosser for not prosecuting a Catholic priest in Green Bay accused of sexually abusing two boys when Prosser was Outagamie County district attorney in the late 1970s.
Some of Greater Wisconsin’s other ads tied Prosser to the policies of newly elected GOP Governor Scott Walker who has been criticized for his efforts to abolish most public employee collective bargaining rights, provide tax cuts and regulatory breaks for corporations and other wealthy special interests and slashing hundreds of millions of dollars in state aid to public schools and medical assistance programs.
The two candidates themselves spent relatively the same amount on their own races. WDC found that Prosser spent $406,283 and Kloppenburg $351,259. Neither side was out spent in any meaningful way.
Check out the WDC report for more details.
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser has at last declared victory in the Wisc. Court race. He had a great quote, too:
“I presume this is my last campaign and that my fifteen minutes of celebrity will soon be over. Greta has stopped calling.”
Good one.
Prosser’s opponent, the union-backed Joanne Kloppenburg has until Wednesday to file for a recount.
This is a great victory for the people of Wisconsin fighting to get their state budget under control. Unions hardest hit.
Tens of thousands of those jobs are gone, some resurfacing at nonunion plants in other states or in foreign countries with cheaper labor costs.
Now, barely one in seven Wisconsin workers is unionized, the lowest ratio since at least 1964, and they’re just as likely to earn their paychecks from taxpayers as they are from corporations.
In placing a stranglehold on the state’s public sector unions, Republican Gov. Scott Walker has struck at perhaps the final source of union strength in the state, and the squeeze is being felt across the country.
“I don’t want to overdramatize it, but we’re getting down to a last stand of the American labor movement and this might be it, and both sides seem to understand that quite keenly,” said Bruce Western, a Harvard University sociologist who studies labor markets. “This explains why there’s so much conflict in Wisconsin.
“The battle has already been lost in the private sector, so it’s really a pivotal moment for American labor,” he said….
Read the rest at Wisconsin State Journal.
