Re: The one piece on what's happening in WI you must read

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 12:43 AM, Karl Swenson <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mar 1, 2011 4:45 PM, "Johne Cook" <[email protected]> wrote:
>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/24/AR2011022406520_pf.html
> This is very misleading.  The simple fact is that 100% of an employee's
> negotiated compensation is 'contributed' by the employee.
>
> **Either there is a dollar mount or not.  Group rates are negotiated like
> anything else, and the employees participation amount is there to be
> measured.

And then you can measure it, and stack it up against all of their
other benefits and compensation, and adjust for age and education
(etc), and find that... public employees by-and-large are making less
overall than private sector employees.  Even after their sweet union
deals and pension plans etc, public sector employees usually still
make about 6-7% than their private sector counterparts.  There are
other intangibles that make the lower salary rational, but I've never
seen an education (etc) adjusted analysis that showed most public
employees ahead of their private counterparts in total compensation.

> **my cousin told me something that made me laugh.  His pension, that he
> contributes almost nothing to, is actually not a pension, it is just part of
> his compensation.  That is nothing but sophistry.

He is obviously confused.  His pension is a pension *and* it is part
of his compensation.  But he contributes just as much to his pension
as you do to your base salary.  Work for hire.

> This isn't 'bringing it in line with the private sector', it's a simple
> paycut and possibly a breach of contract.
>
> **So renegotiate the contracts.  Paycuts in many sector would have prevented
> many layoffs.  They did in mine.  The layoffs we eventuall had were due to a
> loss of a major contract, not the economy.

Actually, I completely agree.  My problem here isn't with the forcing
the employees to accept a pay cut.  My problem is that the *spin* has
been incredibly dishonest.  The politicians would like to break the
previously negotiated employment contract and create a new employment
contract, which amounts to a pay cut.  Perhaps the politicians are
also trying to get out of their responsibilities for breaching the
contract.  At any rate, the employees are working to earn 100% of
their pension now, but you'd like to negotiate it so they directly
earn a lower percentage of their pension (i.e. a paycut) and need to
pay for the rest themselves.  This isn't the worst thing in the world,
it's quite probably a good thing.  Just say it like it is and don't
lie your way through it to demonize the opposition.

> **tell that to the card check crowd.  They won’t rest until the unions are
> even more common, whether we want them or not.  I weep for if they ever hit
> the high tech industry.

If the unions hit the high tech industry, we won't call them unions.
We'll call them something nobler, like "Bar Association" or "Screen
Actors Guild" or "American Medical Association" (etc)... maybe the
American Certified Computer Operators Guild.  And we'll use it to keep
our ranks exclusive via long and exhausting exams and certifications,
thus keeping our salaries high, just like lawyers, doctors, actuaries,
accountants, etc already do.  I'm firmly against programming and IT
certifications, especially enshrined into law.  And I don't think our
industry has the preconditions to support mandatory IT guilds anyway.
But in general you probably won't see much agitation from
conservatives against white collar unions.  (Remember, Reagan was the
president of the Screen Actors Guild.)

> What the politicians and bureaucrats don't want to admit is that they
> mismanaged the fund during the boom years, effectively stealing from the
> employees.  Now that the bubble's popped they can't hide behind unreasonably
> optimistic projections anymore.  They underpayed the fund when times were
> good and now that times are bad they are diverting attention from their
> earlier incompetence.
>
> ***effectively?  If you are referring to SS, they were mandated by LAW to
> steal.

I'm referring to the fact that pension funds are not owned by the fund
managers, but it is the fund managers responsibility to keep funded.
By relying on absurdly optimistic predictions during the boom years,
they underpaid the funds when they were most able to fund them.  Now
that hard times are here, they have to play catch up.  When times are
good, politicians spent what *should* have been money for the pension
fund on whatever they want.  When times are bad, the employees need to
take a paycut.  Heads I win, tails you lose.


> This framing of Walker, et al. as heroes leaves me a little bit nauseous.
> My belief is that the whole union smashing bit is just sleight of hand along
> traditional partisan arguments to distract us from the more dastardly bits
> of the bill: e.g. the no-bid energy asset firesales.  Corruption and crony
> capitalism at its finest.
>
> **perhaps.  The democrat defense of the unions is just quid pro quo for the
> voter base.

The entirely predictable liberal defense and conservative vilification
of unions without any subtlety and with much vehemence in both side's
arguments is what makes this such a great sleight of hand.  Everyone
pay attention to this thing over here where we force some employees to
take a paycut because of the deficit, and we'll do it in the most
bombastic attention-getting manner possible.  No one pay attention to
the quiet back room dealings where we sell off public assets to make
our benefactors rich (and presumably ourselves as well, when our we
get our turn on the other side of the rotating door).

-- 
Nick

-- 
dadl-ot mailing list
http://mail.thehood.us/mailman/listinfo/dadl-ot_thehood.us
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.music.dadl.ot