Again, the public unions, for the most part, have NOT been asking for more over the past few years. Many of them have **voluntarily** made concessions in order to help their public employers out. They often understand the situation, and have either taken cuts or are extending existing contracts without raises or other increases.
That whole, “the unions are sucking us dry!” meme is coming from the (VERY well-funded) Privatization Movement. These people/entities are NOT taxpayer advocates (no matter what they officially call themselves); they are simply looking to take a greater share of the public resources and cash flows, and public unions are the only thing standing in their way.
Hapless Joe Sixpack has been duped. It’s the people behind the Privatization Movement who are responsible for the declining wages and benefits in the private sector. Public employees and their unions have been fighting for many years against the very things that have been pulling J6 under.
——————
Just one example of what I’m talking about (please read the entire article, too):
“Having solved the problem of people not wasting enough time on the internet, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now tackling his first real-world political cause: immigration reform. With a slick new non-profit group funded by tech millionaires, Zuckerberg is rallying Silicon Valley’s elite into a political force they hope might one day rival Wall Street. Zuckerberg’s political moves are of a piece with his career as a tech mogul: hugely ambitious, painfully awkward, entirely self-interested, and surprisingly successful. And he’s just getting started.
Earlier this month, Zuckerberg unveiled the vehicle of his political will: FWD.us, a bipartisan, non-profit political advocacy group that sounds like an iPhone app. FWD.us has attracted big names from both politics and technology, including former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart, Romney adviser Dan Senor, LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, and Google chairman Eric Schmidt. The group hopes to raise $50 million to fund its lobbying for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform, which is currently making its way through Congress.
Why immigration? We need those smart foreign brains: In a Washington Post op-ed announcing FWD.us, Zuckerberg wrote that “in a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country.” To that end, FWD.us says on its website it aims to “establish a streamlined process for admitting future workers” and increase the number of H-1B visas that let companies hire high-skilled foreign workers to “continue to promote innovation and meet our workforce needs.”
The implicit argument behind FWD.us is that the U.S. doesn’t have enough high-skilled domestic workers to meet tech companies’ needs. This is a myth, and Zuckerberg and FWD.us are just the latest tech players to promote it. In fact there is no shortage of domestic IT workers, as shown in a new study from the Economic Policy Institute. While there is an unusually low unemployment rate among American tech workers (3%), they haven’t enjoyed the large salary increases that would signal a shortage. There is also little evidence that the foreign workers tech companies hire are any better than Americans. The real reason tech companies want to hire more high-skilled immigrants is that they can pay them less than Americans, since immigrants are in a more economically precarious position. More than 80 percent of workers hired under the H-1B program are paid less than their American counterparts, according to the EPI. This kind of outsourcing benefits tech companies while hurting domestic tech workers.”
