Hindsight Is 20-20

Watching Wisconsin become the next Egypt is something I'm sure no one ever anticipated, yet, turmoil has been building due to legislation that would eliminate workers rights to bargain collectively for wages, benefits and all that good stuff. Rewind about 50 years before Wisconsin decided to allow public employees to unionize. Around that time, private sector employees were given the green light to bargain collectively. Nowadays, you don't see nearly as much of that happening. The reason: budgetary constraints. You see, private sector employees relied on private entities to pay their wages. Once all those resources were tapped, many businesses either took their companies elsewhere or folded altogether.

With public employees, it's an entirely different scenario since it's the taxpayers who essentially pay their wages. While we could just pack up and move out of state if we're unhappy with the taxes being raised, the burden just grows for everyone else. But the state is broke, so it's very clear that something has to change. Five decades ago, the economy in Wisconsin was entirely different, fully capable of sustaining public unions. Since then, however, more and more public employees have been hired and the ability of these people to bargain collectively has garnered them some of the highest quality benefits packages around. Through the years, the cost to the government has increased significantly.

Therein lies the problem. Public employee unions in Wisconsin don't negotiate salaries based upon the budget of the state government, thus growing the state's debt, which inevitably becomes a bigger burden on the taxpayers. Because of the difficulty of sustaining the salaries of public workers, there's no doubt in my mind that collective bargaining is part of the reason the state has gone so far into the red. Regardless, I totally understand the public employees' perspective in this whole debacle. They don't want to give up their ability to bargain collectively because, once they concede even just a little bit, chances are the government will expect more concessions in the future.

What I don't quite comprehend is that, because collective bargaining has been in place for 50 years, public workers believe they are entitled to it and it has become their right to join unions and fight for their benefits, wages, pensions and all that. Not necessarily. The way I see it, the only things that we're entitled to as Americans are our basic rights that were granted to us by the United States Constitution. Everything else is pretty much fair game. Truthfully, the practice of collective bargaining would not even exist were it not for the governing body of the State of Wisconsin. So, in essence, the government giveth and the government can taketh away.

I know it sounds malicious to put it in those terms, but I honestly do feel bad for union workers. Essentially, they're getting screwed over due to poor decisions that were made by the government five decades ago; it really is unfortunate and unfair. Perhaps, had the Wisconsin government heeded the warning of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who declared that "government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into public service," none of this would be happening right now.

Jennie Oemig
Staff Writer
Trempealeau County Times