What Bargaining Rights are the Unions Giving Up in Wisconsin?

You make a good points. Currently, yelling, demagoguery, and slogans are all we get. Issues can not be discussed in sound bites and neither can they be discussed if you are not in the state to do so. All of those 70s radials are now in positions of power and have learned that the loudest voices are the only ones who are heard. Reason need not apply. Reasoned discourse and intellectual exploration has disappeared. Until we can listen to each other, define a true issue, and debate it openly, we will be ruled by the radical loudmouth.

Dude, I even provided the legislation for people who wanted to say how horrible it was along with the relevant laws that were being changed. What I got was a few left wingers who just regurgitated what they heard on MSNBC without even trying to read the bill. I have yet to get anyone on the left to acknowledge that Wisconsin workers would still have more collective bargaining powers than federal workers. They also won't acknowledge that Obama and the democrats in congress did NOTHING to help federal workers with their collective bargaining powers.

1) The unions would lose control over the public employees. 2) The union members could no longer use bully tactics to keep others in line.

Good luck, bombmnu. I've been asking the same thing to every uberpro-union supporter for weeks - what exactly are they giving up that's so bad? I hear some folks going off on rant after rant about the "workers' rights," but when I ask for specifics on how this will hurt any worthy union worker, I can't get a response outside of "Oh, it's union busting," or "They only want to stop Democratic campaign funding." Now, maybe I'm taking the wrong approach here, but it seems to me that public unions should not be setting its teachers' standards or how peers are evaluated or who gets laid off if that unfortunate scenario arises. And they can still bargain for pay. Unless someone can give another side to this, as in how it's so detrimental to the "average workers," I have to say that this seems fair. Specifically when you're speaking about teachers, the in-house evaluation and handling of bad or inept teachers is out and out fraud on every parent sending their child to public school. I'm not saying that every teacher gets to sleep through the system until they get tenure. But it is obvious that keeping as many teachers as they can and grading on the curve is in a union's best interest, because it's another dues-paying member, another potential vote they need. To start letting bad teachers go or, heaven forbid (), to pay the worse-performing ones less, it would start a chain reaction and completely change the general makeup of how the system works. Why shouldn't the current setup change? That's all I want to know.