Wisconsin public union death throes

Good day all. As you may recall, a couple of years ago, Governor Scott Walker pushed through a number of reforms that gutted the ability of unions to force people to join them as a condition for work.

Now this was public sector unions only, and it really affected the various teachers unions. The unions knew that if these reforms were allowed to stand, their days as the financial arm for the Democrat party were numbered. They were right.

I first wrote about their outright panic back in July. An article from the Western Center for Journalism, which I quoted extensively, showed just how much damage Act 10 did. Well, in the immortal words of Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, “Good news everybody!” It’s gotten a lot worse for the public sector unions out there. In a report from Fox News:

Teachers from one of Wisconsin’s largest unions have jumped ship — voting overwhelmingly to abandon the group in the latest in a string of setbacks for the struggling labor movement following Gov. Scott Walker’s union overhaul two years ago.

The decision this week to disband by members of the Kenosha Education Association came after the organization was stripped of its certification and told it had lost its power to bargain for base wages with the district. The group was decertified after missing a key deadline in the annual reapplication process.

Awwww, what a shame. The union, which for so long had everything it’s own way has been decertified.

When the group might actually disband was not clear and calls to the organization were not returned.

That’s probably due to not paying their bills since they are no longer able to loot their serf’s paychecks. The staff has been laid off.

The development is in keeping with an overall downward spiral for Wisconsin’s public worker unions. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported earlier this year that tens of thousands of teachers and other government workers have left their unions since the Walker-backed law took effect.

Now why would they want to do that? Could it be that the former members don’t like having their money stolen and handed to the Democrats? Could it be that since they aren’t having who knows how much STRIPPED from their paychecks, they are now seeing a nice bump in their take home pay? Now, not everything is all sunshine and roses of course. The unions aren’t going down without a fight.

According to Reuters, elections in 2011 and 2012 — in which 207 school districts, 39 municipal and six state units participated — resulted in 32 unions and their affiliates, or about 13 percent, being decertified.

However, those decertifications are on hold until the legal cases involving Act 10 are resolved in court.

The unions are no doubt hoping they can get one of their pet judges to throw out ACT 10 and let them return to their goals of educating the children looting the state coffers. I can’t see any honest judge ruling in favor of the unions. The very fact that so many are collapsing should indicate to the judge that people don’t like being union serfs. Of course, we all know that most judges are utter morons who don’t have the sense to:

1. Close their mouths
2. Lower their heads
3. Come in out of the rain

Still, I don’t think any judge would be as stupid as to rule in favor of re-enslaving the former members of these unions. The law doesn’t forbid unions, it just lets the members decide if they want to be in one or not. Mostly, it seems that not being in a union is the “New Normal” in Wisconsin.

Christina Brey, a spokeswoman from the Wisconsin Education Association Council, downplayed the re-certification in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

“It seems like the majority of our affiliates in the state aren’t seeking re-certification, so I don’t think the KEA is an outlier or unique in this,” Brey told the paper, adding that certification gives the union scant power over a limited number of issues they’d like a voice in.

But Matt Patterson, labor analyst with the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, claimed the vote was a sign that workers were turning their backs on the unions.

“The news today proves what unions have long feared — that when workers are actually given a free and fair choice, they will often choose opt out of union membership altogether,” he said.

“The public at large — and an increasing number of union members — have become wise to the fact labor unions stifle innovation and burden governments and businesses with unsustainable costs and regulations.”

As I mentioned above, there are still ongoing legal challenges, but they aren’t working out so well for the unions.

The state is still knee-deep in legal challenges to Act 10 and until all of those are decided, the rulings of the lower courts serve more as a moral blow than anything else. However, as these losses pile up, some say it’s only a matter of time before the unions lose their footing in Wisconsin.

The day of the union is pretty much over. They long ago outlived their usefulness to their members and no only exist to enrich the leadership of the unions and to help the Democrats loot the economy. If the unions had died out earlier, we would not have Barack Obama destroying the nation, we would not have Obamacare and the Democrat party would not be run by statists, elitists and communists. Now if we can just get this expanded to the other states that are still enthralled to greedy union thugs, a fair number of America’s problems would be solved.

Thatisall

~The Angry Webmaster~

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