“Perhaps what should happen is that, when a corporation pays a penalty, the money should be required to come out of the budget and bonuses for the people or group who were the most responsible,” he said.
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Questions and exercises for journalism students.
Government workers are disproportionately represented by unions, who help get them decent wages and benefits .... at the expense of the taxpayers who are not only subsidizing generous salary increases, health benefits, and retirement benefits, but area also on the hook for the political muscle and donations groups like AFSCME and the NEA shell out to political candidates ensuring these groups continued generous benefits at the publics expense in the future.
#1 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Tue 10 Aug 2010 at 10:18 AM
I wanna join the AIG, Goldman Sachs, Wall Street executive unions. They seem to have all the real muscle.
And they way they use pensions like the way they want to use social security is awesome.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15148
Who doesn't want in on that club?
Public unions are for suckers. Executive unions... now you are talking.
Non union.. isn't that what illegal aliens are for?
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 10 Aug 2010 at 05:36 PM
Mike H.,
It's good to see that at least you are consistent when you're talking like a stooge
to corporate interests. Public employees are too generously rewarded? In what universe might that be? Are you referring to "uniformed services" as they are sometimes known? It's only the cops and firemen (and the occassional political executive) that occassionally genrate those stories of outsized retirement benefits. The average public employee has been doing a tedious job at below par wages for years. Now that they may still have a job, assuming they haven't been furloughed, every one's griping about their,pay which is still below par. Yes, they get more than minimum wage and some pension benefits, but neither approaches anything more than a middle class level of opulence. That is to say not very much so.
#3 Posted by Jack, CJR on Tue 10 Aug 2010 at 06:28 PM
Drum makes a couple of confessions:
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/08/pensions-and-public
"I should confess here that I'm not a big fan of public employee unions. On my own personal scale of sympathy, I strongly support private sector service unions, I moderately support private sector industrial unions, and I only barely support public sector unions. So no one should expect me to go to the mattresses for public sector benefits. Still, Jon is right: one of the favorite tactics of conservatives is to set the middle class at war with itself. It's sort of the mirror image of corporate compensation committees, which keep CEO pay forever rising because no one wants their CEO to be paid less than average. With middle-income workers, by contrast, the CEO class exploits jealousy toward better compensated unionized workers in order to ratchet things down. The grocery clerks don't want to accept an insurance copay? Well, I have an insurance copay, so why shouldn't they? The truckers don't want to switch their pensions to a 401(k)? Well, I have a 401(k), so why shouldn't they? Etc., etc., ever more disheartening etc.
This is a tactic that works pretty well. As union density has shriveled in the private sector, workers don't really aspire anymore to getting a "good union job," as they often did in the past. It's not even on their radar. Instead, they see a small and privileged group of workers who are better off than them even though they don't work any harder, and instead of wondering why their own pay and benefits are so low, they simply become resentful of this coddled class.
Private sector union density has gotten so low that it's not clear how much they can do about this attitude — and the odds of increasing union density more than a point or two seem cosmically slim. So now it's going to be a war of taxpayers against unionized public employees. It won't be hard, especially in lousy economic times, to convince envious clerks and factory workers that these guys need to be brought down a peg or two. It's just human nature. But wouldn't it be better if all these envious clerks and factory workers were instead asking why their pay and benefits haven't kept up with overall economic growth — which, after all, is all that public sector workers have accomplished? I don't know what the future of unions is in America, but for now they're really the only ones who are asking that question and putting some muscle behind it. Until someone else starts doing a better job of it, we still need them."
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 10 Aug 2010 at 06:48 PM