Gov. Scott Walker, A Man To Fear...

Rational Nation USA
Purveyor of Truth

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is soon to announce his candidacy for the republican nomination for president of the United States of America. Make no mistake about his intentions. Hailed as a right to work advocate his agenda in Wisconsin was to break the backs of labor and his agenda if elected president will no doubt be the same. He is no friend of labor or the small businessman or businesswomen. His loyalty lies with the millionaires and billionaires whose only concern is corporate profits and reducing labor costs as a primary vehicle in doing so.

Gov. Walker, in his own words is to, "divide and conquer. Divide labor and secure the conquest. As for America and the middle class an their American Dream? Well, too f^cking bad.

Beware of this man and think really really hard before considering him for the highest office in our republic. Unless you truly want a new feudalism taking root in America.



In Wisconsin, where the labor movement took root a century ago, a campaign by the governor has broken its power. His political allies hope he can take a similar campaign nationwide.

 



The New York Times - On his first day of work in three months, Randy Bryce asked his foreman for the next day off. He wanted to go to the Capitol in Madison, Wis., and testify against a proposed law. Bryce, a member of Milwaukee Ironworkers Local 8, was unloading truckloads of steel beams to build a warehouse near Kenosha, and he needed the job. He has an 8-year-old son, his debts were piling up and a 10-hour shift paid more than $300. But the legislation, which Republicans were rushing through the State Senate, angered him enough to sacrifice the hours. Supporters called it a “right to work” bill, because it prohibited unions from requiring employees to pay dues. But to Bryce, that appealing name hid the true purpose of the bill, which was to destroy unions.

The next morning, Bryce, who is 50 and has close-­cropped black hair and a horseshoe mustache, woke up at 5:30, got dressed in his usual jeans, hoodie and Local 8 varsity jacket with an I-beam and an American flag stitched on the back and drove 90 miles to Madison in his gray Mustang. Despite the February chill, crowds had begun to gather in the square outside the Capitol. The scene was reminiscent of a similar one that played out four years earlier, in 2011, when thousands of people occupied the Capitol’s rotunda for more than two weeks to protest Act 10, a law that demolished collective-­bargaining rights for nearly all public employees. The protests in Madison were the first significant resistance to the ascendant Tea Party and helped set the stage for Occupy Wall Street. For Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, it was the moment that started his conservative ascent. “The Republican Party has a demonstrated, genuine hero and potential star in its ranks, and he is the governor of Wisconsin,” Rush Limbaugh said last year. The unions, Democrats and other perceived enemies, he continued, had “thrown everything they’ve got at Scott Walker, and he has beat them back without one syllable of complaint, without one ounce of whining. All he has done is win.” Walker is expected to announce in the next few weeks that he is entering the 2016 presidential race.

Skip

At 6 p.m., Bryce’s name finally appeared on the list of coming speakers. He paced the hallway outside the hearing room in anticipation. But 20 minutes later, Stephen Nass, the Republican senator who is the chairman of the Labor and Government Reform Committee, announced that there was a “credible threat of disruption” and that the hearing would be adjourned so the committee could vote to move the bill forward (it passed). A labor organizer, it turned out, had told The Milwaukee Journal ­Sentinel that some people planned to stand up in protest at 7 p.m., when testimony was to be cut off. (“I went through Act 10 — it was ugly,” Nass said earlier in the hearing, referring to the difficulty some senators experienced reaching various parts of the Capitol after the rotunda was occupied. “We had to go through a tunnel like rats. We don’t want to go through that again.”) About a hundred people were still in line to testify. A chant of “Let us speak” erupted. But Nass quickly took the committee members’ votes and was then escorted out, with his two Republican colleagues, by a phalanx of state troopers.

Bryce still wanted to speak. He had lost a day’s wages, and the committee’s two Democratic senators had remained to hear more testimony. State troopers were now blocking the door to the hearing room, though, so he decided to address a group of protesters in the hallway outside instead.

“My name is Randy Bryce,” he began in a loud voice. “I’ve been a member of Ironworkers Local 8 since 1997. I’ve had the privilege in that time to work on many of Wisconsin’s landmarks, private businesses and numerous other parts of our infrastructure.” As he spoke, the protesters began to quiet. Bryce described how he had wandered from job to job after he left the Army, how Local 8’s apprenticeship program had given him direction, a real career. Finally, he presented the case against what he called “a blatant political attack” on his union. “All of our representatives are elected,” he said. “All of the decisions that we make are voted on. The general membership is given monthly reports on how every dime is spent. Every dime spent is voted on. Unlike what is taking place this week, Ironworkers Local 8 is pure democracy. I am disappointed beyond words at not just what this bill contains, but how it is being passed.”

Two days later, just after the full Senate approved the bill that would make Wisconsin the 25th right-to-work state, Scott Walker was in Maryland, attending the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual showcase for conservative activists and Republican presidential hopefuls. At a question-­and-­answer session, one attendee asked Walker how he, as president, would confront the threat from radical Islamist groups like ISIS. Walker’s answer was simple, and may in the end define his candidacy. “If I can take on 100,000 protesters,” he said, “I can do the same across the world.”

Skip

In the fall of 1980, Ronald Reagan, then a Republican presidential candidate, sent a letter to Robert Poli, the president of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, seeking the endorsement of the union, many of whose members were military veterans and socially conservative. “You can rest assured,” Reagan wrote, “that if I am elected president, I will take whatever steps are necessary to provide our air traffic controllers with the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and workdays so that they are commensurate with achieving a maximum degree of public safety.” The union gave Reagan its endorsement.

Eight months later, after contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration failed, the members of the union voted to strike, violating an oath signed by federal employees. Reagan was unsympathetic. After 48 hours, he invoked a provision of Taft-­Hartley and not only fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers, but also had them permanently replaced. The union’s strike fund was frozen, many of its local leaders were imprisoned and, until 1993, the former strikers were banned from the Civil Service. Since Reagan broke that union, the number of large-scale strikes begun in a given year in the United States has fallen to 11 (last year) from 145 (in 1981). In 2014, only 11 percent of all American workers and 7 percent of private-­sector workers belonged to a union.

The night before Walker announced his plans for Act 10 to the public, he gathered his cabinet in the governor’s mansion for a private dinner and a pep talk. During the dinner, Walker stood up and held aloft a picture of Reagan. He singled out the firing of the air traffic controllers as “one of the most defining moments” of Reagan’s political career — a moment, he said, that “was the first crack in the Berlin Wall.”

Skip

In southeastern Wisconsin, union ironworkers earn $55 an hour and receive $33 of that in pretax income. (The difference goes to funding their pensions, health care and training.) The pretax pay for a unionized ironworker in Iowa, a right-to-work state since 1947, tops out at $26 an hour. In Texas, also a right-to-work state since 1947, the sole ironworkers’ local offers pretax wages of $18 an hour. Nonunion workers in the state doing the same job make about $8 an hour. “A mile of U.S. highway in Texas costs close to the same as it does in Wisconsin, certainly not less than half,” Colin Millard, an organizer for the Iron Workers International Union, told me. “So it is only a question of who makes the money — the workers or the owners.”

Ironwork is a dangerous job. It has the sixth-highest fatality rate in the country, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. A 2011 University of Michigan study concluded that the fatality rate in construction trades was 40 percent higher in right-to-work states. Local 8 offers a four-year training program that requires more than 7,000 hours of combined classroom and on-the-job study. Even many right-to-work proponents single out the building trades’ training programs, like Local 8’s, as exemplary.

That is one reason many Wisconsin business owners, who might be expected to cheer the demise of unions and welcome cheaper labor costs, have not done so. Contractors rely on the unions to certify and drug-test workers and keep their workers current on new technologies and job skills. Collectively, Wisconsin’s trade unions contributed more than $30 million last year to training programs

Bill Kennedy, the president of Rock Road Companies, a family-­owned asphalt-­paving operation with headquarters in Janesville, Wis., flew back early from a Florida business trip to testify against the right-to-work bill at the same Senate hearing where Bryce tried to speak. Kennedy also helps run the Wisconsin Contractors Coalition, an organization of business owners whose positions on labor issues counter those of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the most powerful statewide business lobby, which has pushed hard for right-to-work. Within a few months of its founding in 2014, Kennedy’s coalition attracted nearly 450 like-minded businesses that collectively employ some 120,000 people. Like many of the group’s members, Kennedy voted for Walker and contributed to each of his campaigns.

“There’s this misguided myth that unions and management don’t get along,” Kennedy told me the day after the hearing. Rock Road was founded in 1913 by Kennedy’s grandfather. It was a hauling business until the Depression, when it began bidding on government-­funded projects like railroad beds and town roads. At its summertime peak, Kennedy’s company employs about 150 workers. His opposition to right-to-work is rooted in pragmatism. “It’s a business bottom-­line issue,” he said. “Right-to-work is going to compromise my quality, my competitiveness. The unions are my partner. They’re almost like a screening agency.” Kennedy’s greatest fear is that right-to-work will undermine the unions’ contribution, and eventually the quality and skills of his employees. “This is a working system,” he said. “I have never understood this right-to-work agenda.”

Skip

In 1956, the Republican Party platform declared: “The protection of the right of workers to organize into unions and to bargain collectively is the firm and permanent policy of the Eisenhower administration.” President Richard Nixon enthusiastically courted the white “hard-hat vote,” winning a majority of union households in the 1972 election. During a news conference announcing the replacement of the air traffic controllers, Reagan boasted of his union bona fides as a lifelong member of the A.F.L.-­C.I.O. who led the Screen Actors Guild in its first-­ever strike. Walker’s own consistent praise for private unions appears, with the passage of right-to-work, to have come to an end, and with it any sense that his party must even pretend to support labor.

Many union leaders worry that if Walker is elected president, Congress could pass a national right-to-work bill. In January, Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, introduced such a bill in the House; it now has 98 co-­sponsors. In February, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, sponsored a similar bill, which now has co-­sponsors in Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and 15 other Republicans.

Read the complete article BELOW THE FOLD,

Via: Memeorandum