Gay Government Workers and the Wisconsin Public Unions
The public unions battle in Wisconsin is not a specific gay-issue, but it does affect many gays who work as government employees.
Wisconsin teachers unions joined by other public sector unions are demonstrating en mass in Wisconsin Similar unions are doing the same in the Rustbelt. They are angry that GOP Governors are telling teachers to finally pay 12 percent for their health care insurance and their retirement pension.
Moreover, some of these GOP Governors want to restrict collective bargaining powers by such unions. These benefits for unions seem abusive and elitist.
Elitist in the sense that they hardly pay anything toward their benefits and expect the taxpayer to pay for all of their pensions and health insurance.
Meanwhile people in the private sector pay much more for their benefits and get little subsidies for their retirement programs. It seems unfair, arrogant and presumptuous of the union people to expect this in a time of great economic distress and huge government debt.
To rally the public’s support in their favor, unions are telling people that without collective bargaining, weekends, holidays, sick days , health insurance, vacations and maybe even workplace bathrooms will disappear from the American workforce. (In past disputes, the teachers’ union removed toilet paper from school rest rooms to incite revolt.)
This is hardly true, as anybody who has gone to college knows that management theory has advanced long ago to the level where all of these benefits are automatic and institutionalized. Why else has union membership in the private sector dropped from up to 35 percent in the 1970’s to seven percent today? There is simply little need for unions.
Nonetheless, state governments are largely controlled by public sector employee unions, and despite their class warfare rhetoric, they are grossly bankrupting once resilient economies as California, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Ohio.
Perhaps many gay teachers, nurses, police officers may not understand this. But in the last 30 years there is a well-known population shift from the North and Mid-western regions to the South. That is why there is constant population losses in the North as unions chase away employers and capital investment, including foreign investment; leaving in their wake abandoned factories, jobless people on welfare, shrinking revenue bases and unsupported school systems.
Meanwhile, the South continues to blossom in terms of housing, incomes, state revenue, improved universities and upward mobility for most workers.
Unfortunately, many gays are brainwashed into believing that the South is an anachronistic horror story of racism, sexism , bigotry and homophobia.
No region is perfect. But during the 2010 mid-term elections that were swept by the GOP, Republicans sent many minority people to Congress and State Houses. Florida elected GOP Blacks to Congress and a Lt. Governor. New Mexico and South Carolina elected a GOP Latina and an Asian female Governor respectively. Oklahoma and Arizona also elected a GOP female Governor. Moreover, GOP Hispanics are also being elected to public office in Texas and Florida.
The point being that there is plenty of acceptance and opportunity for minority groups even in the conservative, anti-union South. Why else are so many Toyota factories being located in Southern states, while Detroit’s auto industry needs desperate taxpayer financed bailouts?
Polling also seems to give the GOP Governors of the Midwest a noticeable edge. While most voters believe that workers should have some degree of collective bargaining, a poll of likely voters in Wisconsin agree by 70 percent that the Governor should make union members pay for their benefits rather than expect non-union taxpayers to foot the bill. And voters in the Rust Belt do believe GOP Governors when they say that we need to restrict collective bargaining by unions. After all, the teachers union are not the only available source of teachers in any states, and their performance is greatly questionable as a Department of Education study shows that two-thirds of Wisconsin 8th graders can not read at the appropriate level.
Furthermore, a movie is in circulation called, “Waiting for Superman” that exposes the dismal state of union-run public education. It was not produced by some right-wing group, but by the same man who wrote Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”.
And gay government workers might also consider another fact of history. Franklin Roosevelt, a Democratic Party icon, warned the nation about letting the federal work force unionize to run the government. Google the New York Times article. Furthermore, Roosevelt’s position was institutionalized by none other than President Jimmy Carter who signed an executive order forbidding the unionization of the federal workforce. Although Obama promised union voters that he would always march with them when he was a candidate, Obama is conspicuously absent — probably because he presides over a non-unionized federal work force.
As gay people watch the unions take over State Capitol Buildings in the Midwest and chant Marxist class warfare slogans like “Shame” and “Hitler!!!”, they should think about why the higher-employment, higher-income, anti-union South is more prosperous for all Americans…including minorities and gays. For if people from the North were not moving to the South, unemployment and abandoned manufacturing factories would be closer to 20 percent instead of ten percent. And state budget deficits in the Rust Belt would be even more insurmountable.