Corporate Money Behind Threat To Wisconsin Unions- GritTV Special

Corporate Money Behind Threat To Wisconsin Unions- GritTV Special
February 21, 2011

This is a special hour of GritTV on the workers rights crisis from Madison, Wisconsin. The UpTake helped produce this show along with GritTV,Free Speech TV, and WORT FM in Madison.

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“Unions realize that this is a threat to their very existence,” says Matt Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, of Scott Walker’s attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from public workers. And some of the usual suspects are behind Walker’s attack–from the Koch brothers to Republican ideologues. “These corporations want to get these people off the playing field,” says John Nichols, of The Nation. Matt and John discuss the history behind this week’s historic labor protests.

If Scott Walker is allowed to gut public employees’ right to collective bargaining, Sheila Cochran of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council points out, it will lower the floor for all Wisconsinites’ wages and benefits. The unions in the state have long helped keep wages high and benefits, including health care, good for all of the state’s workers, even as factories have closed and jobs gone overseas.

The public sector remains the last bastion of union workers around the country, and Sheila and Diane Palmer of SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin discuss the impact the cuts will have on working families in Wisconsin and around the U.S.

“People understand this is a national struggle,” says Mary Bottari of the situation in Wisconsin right now, and Mark Pocan, Wisconsin State Assemblyman from the 78th District, says “This has to be the spot where we stop it nationally.” If Scott Walker manages to take away the workers’ right to collective bargaining, they point out, other states will do the same–Ohio and Indiana are already trying.

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Link (w/Video): http://theuptake.org/2011/02/21/corporate-money-behind-threat-to-wisconsin-unions/

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