How many "wake-up calls" do we need before people wake up?
"Fast Track" is apparently the favored way of doing things by both Republicans and Obama. Get these dirty deeds done before people understand fully what is going on and can organize effective opposition.
Walker used a "fast track" process to ram through this reactionary undemocratic "Right-to-Work" (for less) legislation that is an attack on the entire working class.
Obama seeks "Fast Track" legislation (he has almost unanimous support from the Republicans) to shove the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) down our throats. Again, an attack on the entire working class.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/10/us/gov-scott-walker-of-wisconsin-signs-right-to-work-bill.html?_r=0
Shouldn't the combination of all of this tell us, as workers. both the Democrats and Republicans are part of Wall Street's "two-party trap" and that we need a new working class based progressive people's party whose politicians would be grassroots and rank-and-file activists?
We need an anti-monopoly people's party to remove Wall Street from power.
U.S.
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin Signs ‘Right to Work’ Bill
MADISON,
Wis. — For decades, states across the South, Great Plains and Rocky
Mountains enacted policies, known as “right to work,” that prevented
organized labor from forcing all workers to pay union dues or fees. But
the industrial Midwest resisted.
Those days are gone. After a wave of Republican victories across the region in 2010, Indiana and then Michigan
enacted right-to-work laws that supporters said strengthened those
states economically, but that labor leaders asserted left behind a trail
of weakened unions.
Now it is Wisconsin’s turn. On Monday, Gov. Scott Walker — who in 2011 succeeded in slashing collective bargaining rights for most public sector workers
— signed a private-sector right-to-work bill that makes his state the
25th to adopt the policy and has given new momentum to the business-led
movement, its supporters say.
“This
freedom-to-work legislation will give workers the freedom to choose
whether or not they want to join a union, and employers another
compelling reason to consider expanding or moving their business to
Wisconsin,” Mr. Walker said.
Even
before the Legislature passed the measure on Friday in a fast-tracked
process, Mr. Walker’s political fund-raisers were raising money on the
issue, saying of the right-to-work bill in an email pitch to donors:
“You know how it is: It threatens the power the Big Government Labor
Bosses crave and they are going to come after him with everything
they’ve got.”
Democrats
assert that Mr. Walker’s real motivation is more about politics than
job creation: breaking a dwindling union movement in Wisconsin and
boosting his standing as the conservative choice for the Republican
presidential nomination next year. And beyond Mr. Walker’s prospects,
they say the new laws throughout the region are intended to help
Republicans build a favorable electoral map for 2016, by weakening the
labor groups that have traditionally provided muscle and money to
Democratic candidates in crucial swing states.
“It’s designed to depress wages and to help them win elections in the future,” Michael Sargeant, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said of passage of the measure, almost entirely on party lines, in Wisconsin. “That’s what this is about.”
Right-to-work
battles are also emerging in other states. Republican legislators in
Missouri and New Mexico are weighing similar measures. In Kentucky,
where a split Legislature and a Democratic governor pose obstacles to a
statewide bill, leaders in more than a dozen counties have approved or are weighing measures, officials there said on Saturday, and efforts in six other counties are awaiting final approval.
And
in Illinois, a long-held Democratic territory with Democratic
supermajorities in the Legislature, the new Republican governor, Bruce
Rauner, announced an executive order
barring state workers who opt out of unions from being forced to pay
fees based on a constitutional argument, offering a new model for states
where split partisan politics have slowed right-to-work policies.
Federal
law already permits workers not to join unions. But right-to-work laws
go further, permitting workers to not pay fees to them. Unions argue
that the fees are fair for nonunion members who still benefit from the
contracts they negotiate, and that without a requirement, their
membership, financial support and very existence are threatened.
The effects of right-to-work measures are fiercely debated and a matter of dueling experts and research papers.
In Michigan, the percentage of workers in unions has dropped
to 14.5 percent from 16.6 percent before the changes. Yet in Indiana,
the percentage of union members actually grew to 10.7 percent from 9.1
percent in 2012, a statistic some labor experts say shows how difficult
it is to gauge the effects of such measures given other factors at play.
In Wisconsin, the percentage of workers in unions has dropped to 11.7 percent in 2014 from 14.2 percent in 2010, before Mr. Walker took office.
Central to the new momentum behind the laws were sweeping Republican victories in state elections in 2010, when the party got full control — in the chambers and the governor’s office — of states that included Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. They made more gains in 2014, now controlling 68 of the 98 chambers around the country and the most state legislative seats since 1920. But it was the victories in 2010 that set off a new flood of right-to-work legislation in the Midwest, which had rarely seen it.
Soon
after taking office, Mr. Walker pressed for a bill that cut collective
bargaining for most public sector workers as well as removing
requirements that they pay fees if they chose not to join unions that
represented them, and Republicans elsewhere followed suit. But not all
of those measures flew through. Ohio, where Republicans had taken sole
control of state government, passed a measure limiting collective
bargaining, but it was rejected months later in a statewide ballot measure.
Then,
for right-to-work advocates, there came an even more memorable turning
point: In November 2012, voters in Indiana (where there had been a
right-to-work law until it was repealed in the 1960s) re-elected
majorities of Republicans to the statehouse even after labor leaders
pledged to defeat them for passing a right-to-work law earlier in the
year. On the same election night, voters in Michigan rejected a
labor-backed ballot measure to enshrine collective bargaining rights in
the State Constitution.
“The
combination sent a clear message to elected officials in the region:
You can end forced dues by passing right-to-work and voters will reward
you for it,” said Patrick Semmens, a spokesman for the National Right to
Work Committee, who keeps a copy of The Indianapolis Star outside his
office from the day after the law passed there.
A month after the 2012 election, the Republican-held Legislature in Michigan, a cradle of the American labor movement, passed a right-to-work measure, which was promptly signed by Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican who had previously said that the matter was not on his agenda.
“It’s
a concerted effort by the folks who have a lot of wealth and power to
get more wealth and power,” Lee Saunders, the president of the American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said. “They’ve had
these plans a long time, and now they’ve come to fruition.”
In
Madison, politics have been nearly impossible to separate from the
debate over the policy in recent weeks. For many Democrats, the issue
became an intense, highly partisan battle over Mr. Walker, his
conservative policies since 2011, and his flirtation with a presidential
bid.
“This is about crushing unions,” Representative Chris Taylor, a Democrat, said during a debate that ran all night last week. At another point, Robin Vos, the Republican House speaker, accused the Democrats of suffering from “Walker Derangement Syndrome.”
In
other states, where the debate is complicated by split partisan
control, leaders were closely watching. In New Mexico, where a
right-to-work measure passed through a newly Republican-held House last
month, Democrats said they expected to see the measure vanish in a
committee of the Senate, still held by Democrats. “This is all about
breaking up unions,” said Sam Bregman, chairman of the New Mexico
Democratic Party.
In
Missouri, Republican lawmakers said they were concerned that they might
be left behind by their Midwestern neighbors, given all that had
changed. A right-to-work measure that had stalled for several years, passed the State House last month,
and a Senate committee is expected to send it to the floor in a matter
of weeks. Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, has suggested a veto is likely,
and Republicans say an override will be difficult.
“But when you see a Wisconsin, a Michigan, when they can get it done there,” said Senator Mike Parson, a Republican, “it’s pretty tough to sit here in Missouri with the makeup of things here and we can’t get it done?”
