Labor & Employment Law

Wisconsin?s Walker Calls for End of Collective Bargaining, Alerts National Guard

By Mike Hall

First Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) announced a state budget plan that  strips state workers of nearly all their collective bargaining rights, cuts pay and benefit and says there will be no negotiations.

Today he took it even further: He announced he has alerted the National Guard to be ready in case state workers strike or rise in protest. He told the Associated Press he’s been working on contingency plans for months.

The last time the National Guard was used against public workers was the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968, just before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s  assassination.  The last time the Guard was called out in Wisconsin to quell a labor dispute was the 1934 Kohler strike by the UAW.

Walker may be suffering from a bit of right wing paranoia about unions. Today when he dropped the National Guard bombshell, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:

The Capitol news conference where Walker announced his plan had unusually high security, with four Capitol police offers stationed outside of it and checking on who was attending the event.

What a way to conduct the state?s business!

Click here to sign our Twitter petition to Governor Walker or  to sign via Twitter, just tweet: petition @GovWalker to stop outrageous attacks against #WI workers. http://act.ly/32z #Wisconsin #WIgov #p2 (Please Re-Tweet)

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on February 11, 2011 (boomark / email).