Wrestlin' in Wisconsin

When even the sycophant Republican pollster is showing you sinking, things are not good!

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When even the sycophant Republican pollster is showing you sinking, things are not good!

You are quite ignorant, so I here take the time to point out that the best way to keep the job approval ratings high during the first years in office are to say nice words and do nothing. Ya, these polls mean something, but not anywhere nearly what you surely thing that they do.

You went all-in on this issue earlier in the thread, with bold pronouncements that 'America supports your position' and that the Dems would quickly lose. Turns out you are wrong on both counts, and now are left with nothing much more to do than sort of mutter and complain.

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You went all-in on this issue earlier in the thread, with bold pronouncements that 'America supports your position' and that the Dems would quickly lose. Turns out you are wrong on both counts, and now are left with nothing much more to do than sort of mutter and complain.

I am a self described radical leftist and union man who said that Walker very well might be able to pull off this power play. The reason being is that unions are very difficult to defend now. However,the point of my last post is that job approval rating s of 40% dont mean much right now, they could as easily be used to argue that Walkers is doing something right as that Walker is doing something wrong...and I am very sure that you have not lived enough to understand this.

I don't know if these reports are true or not, and we should treat them with caution. But we now have two news outlets, one local and one national, claiming GOP defections from Governor Scott Walker may be in the works.

"It looks like the only way we can kill this bill is to never come back," said state Sen. Robert Jauch, who is among the 14 Democratic lawmakers who decamped to Illinois to prevent a Senate quorum to vote on Walker's bill

Over the past few weeks, right-wing legislators have unleashed a torrent of radical legislation upon the American electorate designed to gut collective bargaining rights and attack the middle class. As these conservatives have launched their assault, a Main Street Movement consisting of ordinary Americans fed up with living in such an unequal country has fought back.

Conservatives have sought to malign this movement by claiming that it is simply defending the parochial interests of labor unions, who they claim are imposing huge costs on taxpayers with little benefit. Yet the truth is that America’s public and private unions have been one of the major forces in building a robust and vibrant middle class and have fought over the past century to improve the lives of all Americans in a variety of ways. ThinkProgress has assembled just five of the many things that Americans can thank the nation’s unions for giving us all:

1. Unions Gave Us The Weekend: Even the ultra-conservative Mises Institute notes that the relatively labor-free 1870, the average workweek for most Americans was 61 hours — almost double what most Americans work now. Yet in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, labor unions engaged in massive strikes in order to demand shorter workweeks so that Americans could be home with their loved ones instead of constantly toiling for their employers with no leisure time. By 1937, these labor actions created enough political momentum to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped create a federal framework for a shorter workweek that included room for leisure time.

2. Unions Gave Us Fair Wages And Relative Income Equality: As ThinkProgress reported earlier in the week, the relative decline of unions over the past 35 years has mirrored a decline in the middle class’s share of national income. It is also true that at the time when most Americans belonged to a union — a period of time between the 1940′s and 1950′s — income inequality in the U.S. was at its lowest point in the history of the country.

3. Unions Helped End Child Labor: “Union organizing and child labor reform were often intertwined” in U.S. history, with organization’s like the “National Consumers’ League” and the National Child Labor Committee” working together in the early 20th century to ban child labor. The very first American Federation of Labor (AFL) national convention passed “a resolution calling on states to ban children under 14 from all gainful employment” in 1881, and soon after states across the country adopted similar recommendations, leading up to the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act which regulated child labor on the federal level for the first time.

4. Unions Won Widespread Employer-Based Health Coverage: “The rise of unions in the 1930′s and 1940′s led to the first great expansion of health care” for all Americans, as labor unions banded workers together to negotiate for health coverage plans from employers. In 1942, “the US set up a National War Labor Board. It had the power to set a cap on all wage increases. But it let employers circumvent the cap by offering “fringe benefits” – notably, health insurance.” By 1950, “half of all companies with fewer than 250 workers and two-thirds of all companies with more than 250 workers offered health insurance of one kind or another.”

5. Unions Spearheaded The Fight For The Family And Medical Leave Act: Labor unions like the AFL-CIO federation led the fight for this 1993 law, which “requires state agencies and private employers with more than 50 employees to provide up to 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave annually for workers to care for a newborn, newly adopted child, seriously ill family member or for the worker’s own illness.”

The way I see it, the democrats have nothing to lose by staying away which will cause walker to force them back and then a vote which has turned very unpopular will be forced through by republicans.