Events in Wisconsin are a frontal attack on labour rights

I’m appalled.
 
I’m appalled at the frontal attack on collective bargaining rights happening in Wisconsin right now. The State Governor, Scott Walker, wants to strip collective bargaining rights from 175,000 public sector workers. Under proposed legislation, workers would no longer have a voice on key issues such as working conditions, health and safety, grievance procedures, or equality provisions.
 
This situation is not only immoral, it’s illegal under international law: the right to bargain collectively is recognized through the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Labour Organization says that the right to collective bargaining is an essential right of workers. And it is! In most lines of work, employees’ ability to negotiate better wages with corporate employers is limited. With government, individuals’ power to negotiate is non-existent. That’s why public sector unions exist.
 
Meanwhile, public sector workers are being scapegoated; they are being tarred as the grossly overpaid villains. In fact, public sector workers in Wisconsin are paid less than private sector workers, according to an article in the Economist. Let me repeat that: public sector workers are paid less.
 
Last week, Barbara Yaffe wrote a nationally syndicated column titled “Want to make money? Try public service” which threw about some grossly misleading figures about public sector wages, using right wing sources and studies to justify her diatribe.
 
In British Columbia, public sector wage increases have barely kept ahead of annual inflation over the last decade. Taking inflation into account, public sector workers received annual increases of 0.15%.  For a worker earning $50,000 a year, a 0.15% raise is roughly equivalent to earning an extra $77 over the course of the year. And our members will not receive a raise this year, regardless of inflation, which stood at 2.3% in January.
 
The whole attack on public sector workers is justified by the need to trim government debt, Yaffe and other right-wingers say.
 
Hold on a second: why are governments around the world carrying such deficits? Because they poured trillions of dollars of taxpayers money to rescue a financial system brought to its knees by greedy bankers. Moreover, the powers that be in Ottawa and Victoria are choosing to lower corporate taxes and to tax the rich comparatively less. They are choosing to take in less taxes than they could.
 
Unions exist because workers have to defend their rights and their pocketbook. We can’t let the extremists like Scott Walker or Barbara Yaffe have their way. We stand in solidarity with the public sector workers in Wisconsin.