We're about to enter a new month tomorrow... the second month of the latest ongoing battle in the war on American workers.
We continue to return to the story of the insanely ignorant governor of Wisconsin and the fight going on in that state that has now spread all across the country. Frankly, we'd rather that workers rights and labor organizations weren't under constant attack from corporatists and the political far right. Governors claiming the tea party mantle and others attacking worker's rights across the United States seem to have no more sense about their real position in the universe than Muammar Gaddafi does about his current "leadership" of Libya. Consequently, the stupidity of these abusive governors toward worker's rights continues to make news.
In Wisconsin, the governor has taken to threatening protesting state workers with layoffs in order to try and jam his illegal bill down the throats of his citizens - even though doing so would be a further violation of Wisconsin's strict ethics laws. Governor Walker doesn't seem to care that he's already violated those ethics laws (as displayed during that famous prank phone call last week), any more than he cares about actually balancing the budget in Wisconsin.
Some less than brilliant governors in other states seem to be cautiously following Walker's headlong leap into legal jeopardy in their own twisted ways.
In Nebraska, Gov. Dave Heineman and corporatist-backed Republicans are once again attempting to abolish the Commission of Industrial Relations (also known as the CIR), which acts as the arbiter for labor and union issues in the state of Nebraska. The law also doesn't seem to matter to Governor Heineman, as the Nebraska State Supreme Court has defended the right of the CIR to exist and to conduct arbitration in impasse situations between management and public employees.
In case you didn't know, public employees in the state of Nebraska are forbidden by state law to strike. Thus, the existence of the CIR as a mediator in such situations. Without the CIR, public employes would have to legally be allowed to strike.
All of us - our staff members, the outside sources we consult with, Democrats, Republicans, and independents - understand that both states and the Federal government are in a real bind, fiscally speaking.
That is no excuse for attempting to balance budgets by breaking the law, or by breaking the backs of constitutionally protected union workers while simultaneously conducting giveaways to the richest among us.
We have been jumping up and down on the issue of what is needed to properly manage state and federal budgets for many years now. We agree that budget cuts are PART of the whole solution, as are fairly-imposed tax increases and more effective revenue collection. Our regular readers know that the only way we could be even more animated about the issue of what's needed to fix government finances is if we set our hair on fire, and ran onto the stage at an awards show like the Oscars (Doing so may have helped that telecast).
As we've said previously, it all seems to boil down to an attempt to cancel or limit the ability of public workers to engage in meaningful collective bargaining for wages, benefits, and working conditions - which are constitutionally guaranteed to workers. Time and again, those who support the anti-worker side of the labor/management war keep screaming they're not getting a fair deal, almost exclusively because they're not "winning" - AND they're not being allowed to cheat.
Our response to them is simple: there have been PLENTY of people, both Democrats and Republicans, who have faced tough budget situations before, at virtually every level, and those people never had to break the law, break the unions, or weasel around their state's constitution to find a solution to their budget woes.
If these petulant, childish governors feel the only tool left in their arsenal to handle the current budget emergency they face is to threaten to cheat and break laws, maybe we should all threaten to use a tool we citizens have for when government executives prove they are criminally incompetent:
Impeachment and/or Recall Elections.
