WaPo Op Ed: Workers Toppled a Dictator in Egypt, but Might be Silenced in Wisconsin

In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In the United States, by contrast, February is shaping up as the cruelest month workers have known in decades.

The coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens of thousands of Egyptian workers went on strike beginning last Tuesday. By Friday, when Egypt's military leaders apparently decided that unrest had reached the point where Mubarak had to go, the Egyptians who operate the Suez Canal and their fellow workers in steel, textile and bottling factories; in hospitals, museums and schools; and those who drive buses and trains had left their jobs to protest their conditions of employment and governance. As Jim Hoagland noted in The Post, Egypt was barreling down the path that Poland, East Germany and the Philippines had taken, the path where workers join student protesters in the streets and jointly sweep away an authoritarian regime.

But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo, one state government in particular was moving to topple workers' organizations here in the United States. Last Friday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin's new Republican governor, proposed narrowing the state's budget deficit by taking away most collective bargaining rights of public employees. Under his legislation, which has moved so swiftly through the newly Republican state legislature that it might come to a vote Thursday, the unions representing teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose the right to bargain over health coverage, pensions and other benefits. (To make his proposal more politically palatable, the governor exempted from his hit list the unions representing firefighters and police.) The only thing all other public-sector workers could bargain over would be their base wages, and given the fiscal restraints plaguing the states, that's hardly anything to bargain over at all.

You might think that Walker came to this extreme cost-cutting measure after negotiations with public-sector unions had reached an impasse. In fact, he hasn't held such discussions. "I don't have anything to negotiate," Walker told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week. To underscore just how accompli he considered his fait, he vowed to call in the National Guard if protesting workers walked off the job or disrupted state services.

It's a throwback to 19th-century America, when strikes were suppressed by force of arms. Or, come to think of it, to Mubarak's Egypt or communist Poland and East Germany...

More at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/15/AR2011021504339.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

USA! USA! USA!

there`s going to be a warm summer in wisconsin. the unions and students are not going to back down.

The workers of Wisconsin were certainly not silenced today, they got thousands of people to march on the Capitol on a Tuesday afternoon. They got hundreds more in Eau Claire to protest Walker's visit. To get the turnout they did during the work week shows that people are very upset and are willing to disrupt their daily lives to speak out.

These are Wisconsin's teachers, their fire fighters, their University employees, they are people that ordinary Wisconsin citizens know and care about. If Walker deploys the National Guard against Wisconsin's teachers all hell will break loose, a Wisconsin resident seeing a video of their beloved former high school English teacher getting tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets will be outraged in a way they have never been outraged at a public official before. If Walker actually does what he threatens to do he is going to be facing a public backlash of epic proportions, as much as he may want to silence the people will not be silent while their friends and neighbors are being assaulted.

I live in Minnesota in the Twin Cities area and the Wisconsin border is only a short drive for me, if anyone knows of any protests taking place in western Wisconsin please let me know and I would be happy to help Wisconsin workers in any way I can.