Correct me if I’m wrong…

Let’s say you are an hourly paid county employee. You have negotiated your pay and benefits and make $40,000/year.
Your supervisor is salaried, making $70,000/year. He/she has the same benefits but higher pay, as well as a higher amount being put in their pension.
How do the salaried employees negotiate their pay and benefits?

I’m assuming that they don’t. After the unions have negotiated their packages, the salaried employees are thrown in the group, and basicly, get the same benefits, but higher pay and pension contributions.

In order to cut from the top, you need to change the rules for the workers that negotiated these benefits, that are on the bottom. If this is done, no one will be safe from being hired and terminated on a “needs” basis, hourly OR salaried. Once a budget is established, whether it be State, County, or Municiple, slash and burn can be done at will.

The protest is mainly about a new governor that is acting more like a dictator than a leader of a democracy. There is no simple answer to the deficits that we have. It took years of careless spending, and will take even more years to decrease.

But a governor coming into office and trying to change the face of the state, in just a few short weeks, without feeling the pulse of the people, is walking on thin ice.
It looks like there may be several more days, if not weeks of “game playing” before this is settled.

My stand? Changes need to be made in the top, salaried benefit packages. The vested administrators and executives that cash out their millions at early retirement, only to seek employment elsewhere, need to be curtailled, as well. The hourly paid workers need to take concessions, as well, but they need preperation time to make some life style changes.
It will take a minimum of 2 generations to resolve the national deficit, much less state by state. We need to make changes, but they should be discussed by both sides, thus the word “negotiation”.

My concern? What happens to seniority if collective bargaining is gone? Job security will be a thing of the past, which will cause family, business. and relationship problems. We may need to implement the same social programs that we cut employment from to balance the budget.

An interesting saga is being played out in Madison. Let’s hope it doesn’t get resolved in the same fashion as the company towns in the coal mining era of the ’30s.

@bigjim60 wrote:

Seniority goes out the window. I was talking with a school administrator yesterday, and he told me that an administrator from another district had told him that, if this bill is passed and he needs to cut teachers, he will cut the ones with the most seniority, because they get paid the most.

In the salaried, non-unionized, private world, seniority doesn’t mean much either. Especially during acquisitions, mergers, and down-sizings.

I can see both sides of the fence from here.

My health insurance is more expensive than a state of wisconsin employee’s health insurance and I get less insurance for my money. I put my own money in a 401K account for retirement. I am employed at-will and can be terminated at any time. If I had cheaper, better insurance, free money at retirement, and a group to fight for my employment “rights” and was about to lose all or some of those things I probably would be upset too.

I think it’s horrible that over 200 teachers in my kid’s district called in sick yesterday. However, I’m not sure how they can make themselves heard if they’re at work teaching.

I won’t comment on the politics.

Having been a teacher, union member, hourly laborer, salaried nonunion worker, and sole proprietor in my life, I have strong opinions grounded in experience but I will not express them here. I know it is an off topic thread but keep in mind it is a geocaching forum. No good can come of this.

Maybe as a distraction a new topic could be started on the merits of TEMPORARY CACHES. That way everyone could stay riled up and it would now be geocache related.

Bring back the DEAD HORSE too.

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Ho Hum. No protestors = no excitement for me on the way home. Time to go back to the useless drivel in the other forum.

The single Mom with several children deserves the same amount of sympathy as the home with 2 state employees that have twice as much to lose as a home with one.
We all know people who work for the state. They are different people with different personalities. I don’t agree with all their comments, but look past them and wonder what turns this tale will make in the distant future.

Walker was elected with 52% of the vote, by voters looking for a change during a recession. I know many Republicans, other than the Elite 19, that are surprised by his actions toward collective bargaining.

The STATE Democrats weren’t needed for negotiations. Only 1 was needed (for a quorem) to have a vote. I don’t think that “talking” was an option.

ObamaCare? Was voted on in Washington, D.C., and probably done illegally, to boot, according to the many pending court cases on it. And most of the ObamaCare was effective for 2014, not immediately.

I understand the threat of lay-offs. We don’t need anymore, especially teachers. Concessions must be made to keep employment steady.

I doubt anyone has all the answers, but we are all going to feel this thing, one way or another.