Labor & Employment Law

Trumka: ?This Is Not About a Budget Crisis?

By Donna Jablonski

“No person should have to face the loss of their rights or the loss of their jobs,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said today on NBC’s Meet the Press. His remarks came in response to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) threat to begin laying off public employees if he doesn’t get his way on a sham budget bill that would strip away collective bargaining rights.

Governors with state budget problems who sit down and bargain with public employees can solve problems, Trumka said, but Walker’s attack is not about budgets. Public workers have agreed to fiscal concessions Walker’s budget bill seeks, but in his drive to kill bargaining rights Walker has refused.

Speaking with Meet the Press host David Gregory, Walker doubletalked his way around why he has refused the concessions. Ironically, Walker portrayed himself as the defender of local budgets against the big, bad public servants, ignoring a plea by more than 200 local officials that he stop his attack on middle-class workers and their rights. As a county executive, Walker launched an over-the-top attack on public employees, overstepping his own bargaining team, that was blocked by arbitrators and a restraining orders. 

Walker’s refusal to accept the offer by public employees reveals that this fight is “not about a budget crisis,” Trumka said, citing studies showing that the state’s public workers are underpaid compared with private-sector workers, the state’s pension plan is almost fully funded and states that block collective bargaining have massive debts.

Responding to Gregory’s “what comes next” question, Walker kept the “bully” in bully pulpit, saying if Democratic legislators who have fled the state to stymie a vote on Walker’s bill don’t return, he’ll begin laying off state workers.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on February 27, 2011 (boomark / email).