This is Wisconsin, right? Well then where are the 250,000 jobs our new governor promised us when he was elected and declared Wisconsin “open for business?”
There has to be a bunch of construction jobs stemming from the $810 million dollars the federal government gave us to build high-speed rails. Not to mention all the long-term jobs that will come from maintaining and operating the rail, right? Nope, our job-creating juggernaut evidently dropped out before the economics lesson of where jobs come from because he killed that bill and celebrated doing it.
Funny that, because he wasn’t the only one to celebrate the decision. The Los Angeles Times went out of its way to say “thanks a billion cheeseheads” as all that money – and the jobs and improved infrastructure it promised – was redistributed by the federal government to California. Okay, well no big deal, I guess; you win some, you lose some – clearly Gov. Scott Walker has a way better way to create jobs and invest in Wisconsin.
Wind energy developers are excited to invest in Wisconsin; that must be the source of all these jobs the governor is talking about. Unfortunately, if Walker has his way, a bill will be passed making the requirements of where wind turbines can be placed the most restrictive in the country. Once again we could see jobs walking out of Wisconsin, as Illinois has been all too eager to entice wind energy to “escape to Illinois.”
Not exactly a good start, and with the state budget facing a $137 million dollar deficit, it is not a surprise that an unpopular decision was inevitable. But that in no way defends the contents of the budget repair bill.
On the general principle of increasing pension and health care contributions from state employees, Walker appears to offer a concrete solution to the budget problems, pointing out that the increases in pension payments fall within national averages and the health care payments still well below them.
Even this is a patently Walker move, as he defended it by saying, “We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots.” Unfortunately for Walker, the Economic Policy Institute recently released a paper showing Wisconsin public sector workers are underpaid by 8.2 percent compared to similar private sector workers.
Not only does he feel these cuts are warranted, in a rejection of every labor protection trend in this country over the last 50 years, but Walker also aims to remove the rights of workers to collectively bargain because “Wisconsin is broke,” and there is nothing to negotiate.
If watching the labor negotiations of professional athletics – most recently the NFL negotiations – has taught me anything, it is that both sides, at least initially, will demand too much from the other side. To pretend that dissolving the conversation before it can move to its natural conclusion is anything other than a blatant power grab is ridiculous.
Walker said in a recent press conference it usually takes about 15 months to come to a new collective agreement. In fact, he says that is why he aims to dissolve bargaining all together – because Wisconsin can’t wait in uncertainty.
Fifteen months! Dissolving that into a five-day, accept-our-conditions-now-or-else farce is pathetic. And as if that wasn’t enough, tucked within the bill are also provisions that would give his administration direct control in the reshaping of our state’s health care programs, which affect more than 1 million people. This would be possible because it would move the review of Medicaid to the Legislature’s budget committee, which has a greater Republican majority than any other committee.
The final straw, at least for the people invested in our UW community, has to be the total disregard for the university to be, as Chancellor Biddy Martin put it in an e-mail to students yesterday, “a talent magnet and job creator.” All that awaits UW in this bill is a loss of benefits to keep quality TAs and other faculty at UW and budget cuts that promise ever-increasing tuition costs. The attack on UW appears to be a harsh reality.
So far in the clusterfuck that has been the first six weeks of the Walker administration, Wisconsin has rejected a federally funded opportunity to create jobs and improve our infrastructure and threatened to curtail alternative energy development.
Rejecting existing jobs was not enough, as this latest flourish promises to devalue the backbone of Wisconsin, be it our university or our civil servants. Walker seems content to ignore his obligations to the Wisconsin people lest they interfere with his ability to cut tax breaks for his corporate buddies. So where are the jobs, governor? Better yet, where are your loyalties?
