凍結 天然氣 火車

"More than half of all union members nationally are public employees".

In cities in Arizona cops are usually about 50 percent of the number of employees, with firefighters following them by being around 25 percent of the employees.

I think that in Arizona most of the cops and firefighters are represented by unions. Of course Arizona is a right to work state and nobody can be forced to join a union, so not all cops and firefighters are union members.

As I said before I am not against unions, but sadly most unions seem to behave like criminal thugs and use violence and other crimes to help increase the wages and benefits of the members. I certainly am against unions that do that.

Source

Bad call by Wisconsin Dems

By Michael Barone

Friday, June 8, 2012

The results are in, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has beaten Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in the recall election.

That’s in line with pre-election polling, though not the Election Day exit poll. Even before the results came in, we knew one thing, and that is that the Democrats and the public employee unions had already lost the battle of ideas over the issue that sparked the recall, Walker’s legislation to restrict the bargaining powers of public employee unions.

That’s supported by a Marquette University poll showing 75 percent of Wisconsin voters favoring increases in public employees’ contributions for health care and pensions. It also showed 55 percent for limiting collective bargaining for public employees and only 41 percent opposed.

But the strongest evidence is that Barrett and the Democrats avoided the issue. They had tried to make the election about anything else, such as an investigation of staffers for Walker when he was Milwaukee County executive.

A defeat in a state where public employee union bargaining was authorized in 1959 has national implications.

Unions spent $400 million in the 2008 election cycle to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats. More than half of all union members nationally are public employees.

Public employee unions insist that dues money be deducted from members’ paychecks and sent directly to union treasuries. So in practice, public employee unions are a mechanism for the involuntary transfer of taxpayers’ money to the Democratic Party.

Walker’s law ended this practice and gave public employees the choice of whether to pay union dues. The membership of AFSCME, the big union of state employees, fell from 62,818 to 28,785.

The battle of ideas in Wisconsin may have affected opinion nationally. The annual Education Next poll of opinion on teacher unions showed little change between 2009 and 2011, but this year the percentage with a positive view dropped from 29 percent to 21 percent. It dropped from 58 percent to 43 percent among teachers themselves.

The case for public employee unions has never been strong. Public unions’ institutional incentives are to increase pay and benefits, which costs taxpayers money, and to limit employee accountability, which tends to reduce the quality of public services.

Perhaps the weakness of the case for public employee unions kept Barack Obama from doing much to help them in Wisconsin. Or perhaps he was preoccupied by the faltering economy or fatigued by the six fundraisers he attended last Friday, when the dismal jobs numbers came out.

Whatever the reason, Obama did fly over Wisconsin from a Minneapolis fundraiser to his home in Chicago. And on Monday, he tweeted his “backing” of Tom Barrett, although he didn’t use the full 140 characters.

Now the public employee unions are threatened. Walker’s victory in Wisconsin shows that the case against powerful public employee unions can be not only defended but advanced, in a state with a long progressive tradition, which has not voted Republican for president since 1984.

That’s a lesson that may be taken to heart by governors, legislatures and voters in other states being pushed toward bankruptcy by union-negotiated benefits and pensions.

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner.