Walker's Extremist Bill Passes Committee

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's union-busting bill passed out of the Senate committee by a 12-4 margin last night. This pure politics, power-move is being exposed now:

Major elements of the budget-repair bill remain in place. It would require most public workers to pay half their pension costs - typically 5.8% of pay for state workers - and at least 12% of their health care costs. It applies to most state and local employees but does not apply to police, firefighters and state troopers, who would continue to bargain for their benefits.

Except for police, firefighters and troopers, raises would be limited to inflation unless a bigger increase was approved in a referendum. The non-law enforcement unions would lose their rights to bargain over anything but wages, would have to hold annual elections to keep their organizations intact and would lose the ability to have union dues deducted from state paychecks.

The most significant change the Joint Finance Committee approved would require local governments that don't have civil-service systems to create an employee grievance system within months. Those local civil-service systems would have to address grievances for employee termination, employee discipline and workplace safety.

The bill also gives Walker's Department of Health Services the power to write rules that would change state laws dealing with medical care for children, parents and childless adults; prescription drug plans for seniors; nursing home care for the elderly; and long-term care for the elderly and disabled outside of nursing homes.

The programs that could see changes under the proposal would include the BadgerCare Plus and BadgerCare Core plans, Family Care and SeniorCare.

Disgusting. This is about crippling the ability of public-sector workers to take part in politics- and of course taking health care away from people. The savings of $330 million do little to nothing about the $3 billion shortfall in coming years to Wisconsin. There could be a Senate vote today.

If this law passes, these workers should just not go back to work. I don't know if there are enough unemployed people in the state to fill the state workers' positions, but i'm sure there aren't enough "qualified" people out there. They should just shut down the state by not taking work under these terms. This is little more than extremist, power-grabbing, people hurting politics from a Governor who is too much of a coward to admit it.