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A Cruel Hoax Played on Union Workers; Why Wisconsin Stripped Collective Bargaining from Unions

By Joseph McDaniel, Esq.

Union workers often include heroes like firemen and policemen, and unions are often involved in collective bargaining.

And the unions, because they focus well, are frequently better at collective bargaining than the cities and states with which they bargain.

There is a law of unintended consequences coming here.

If you get somebody to agree to pay you more money than you have, that deal will not last.

Politicians often get behind the desires of unions, and it's pretty easy to buy votes with deals that seem okay today (yeah, your salary is high, but you do great work!), but have goodies on the back end (and you can retire at forty and collect most of your pensions, and the amounts of your pensions will be very high!) that can make a city or a state insolvent.

So it is with Wisconsin. Politicians had made common cause with unions forever, and when the unions said they wanted things, if one politician wouldn't deliver, the unions voted for one who would.

And that was fine, until the bill came due for the back end benefits.

Because when the cupboard is bare, it doesn't matter what promises were made fifty years ago; no money means insolvent.

This paragraph from the Reuters article says it all:

"Senate Joint Finance Committee co-chair Alberta Darling said the choice is either to get these concessions from employees, or lay them off.

"It's not like we're choosing to do this. We are broke," she said."

So the choice will be pretty simple all around the country; crazy promises by politicians for fifty years have made some people pretty happy about the prospect of retirement, but there's no dough for social security (the world's biggest Ponzi scheme) or for retirement pensions all over the country.

It will be interesting to see how the Wisconsin experiment works out; I hope somebody tells the truth to the unions for a while, and I hope that the unions believe it.

Because nobody is going to bail out Wisconsin, so it's going to have to live within its means.

Now if we can just convince the Federal Government to quit printing money like paper, there is a small hope that we can dodge the hyper-inflation bullet.

Because if we get to hyper-inflation, governments at all levels can pay people any pension they want; the currency will be worth as much as a Zimbabwe ten-trillion dollar bill!

And people will pay bankruptcy lawyers in Arizona in citrus, cattle and copper! Or maybe chickens. Chickens are nice. With catsup.

Full post as published by Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog on February 17, 2011 (boomark / email).