-By Warner Todd Huston
Unions are having a tough time of it in Wisconsin of late. Since Governor Scott Walker saved the state budget with his new union rules and since he gave workers a choice, Wisconsin’s teachers unions have been in steep decline and this year’s certification vote was further proof that workers don’t want unions.
Under Act 10 in Wisconsin, it is now the law that teachers unions have to be re-certified each year and to be recognized as a bargaining unit the unions must get 51% support from members.
Since Act 10, unions have found that members are very, very unhappy to be part of their organization and thousands of teachers are opting out. This year, nearly 15,000 public employee union members refused to vote for their union, and 25 more unions were decertified by a vote. That is 100 fewer unions than last year even applied for re-certification.
This brings the number of Wisconsin teachers unions to 285 state wide, down from 408 last year.
These are devastating numbers for Wisconsin public employee unions.
As the Wisconsin-based MacIver Institute notes, “The amount of bargaining units even trying to recertify dropped by more than 25 percent since last year and thousands of public union members all across Wisconsin did not vote in support of being represented by their union.”
This could spell more bad news for unions as teachers find out they are not compelled to be in a union.
Walker’s move in Wisconsin is a model for every state and more should emulate his policies. It is the best way we can begin to eliminate a creature that should never have existed in the first place: the government union.
Before you go off on your hate for the right and claim that being anti-government union is only a conservative “thing,” be aware that the god of the liberal movement, President Franklin Roosevelt, was 100 percent against government workers unionizing.
DuringWWII, FDR said that government unions were “unthinkable and intolerable.”
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Follow Warner Todd Huston on:
Twitter
Facebook
Tumblr
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.