Changing Unionized Labor Forever

The governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, is faced with a $137 million budget shortfall for the fiscal year and an expected $3.6 billion gap over the next two years. He is pushing for a bill that has every union worker in an uproar. The bill will cause most state, local, and school employees to pay half their pension costs. The bill will also require them to pay double their current contribution of 12.6 percent to health-care costs. Union workers, with the exception of police, firefighters, and troopers, will lose their collective bargaining power on everything besides wages. However, raises in pay will be from the sole result of inflation. This bill will also require elections to be held every year by all non-law-enforcement unions in order to stay certified. Although not every union worker agrees with the solutions that this bill proposes to decrease the budget deficit, I believe the bill’s requirements for union workers has many key points which will be beneficial for our economy and the majority of American workers. Collective bargaining needs to be weakened in order to help save money, decrease corruption within unions, and help U.S. companies with foreign competition. There has been strong support for the decline of unions and their collective bargaining power recently. However their opposition, who are those in favor of unionized labor, in no way go unnoticed and often cause many problems for the legislation required to pass such a bill. Over 25,000 union workers, who undoubtedly believe in the use and benefits of unionized labor, gathered in protest one Friday morning around the Capitol building. Earlier that week, there had been more than 40,000 protestors. One rally had even lasted an astounding 17 hours (Jonsson). Even though the union workforce has dropped from an astounding 33 percent in 1953 to an all-time