Scott Walker Not For America
Channel: Knowledgy SQL Consulting Atlanta
Date: 2015-07-14

Scott Walker Leads all-out war on workers, but fails to generate jobs and higher wages: In recent months, Walker has intensified the assault on workers, the poor and most vulnerable with punitive new laws and provisions of his new two-year $73 billion state budget. Since taking office, Walker has been staging this relentless war on worker rights and wages, despite already-declining household incomes—especially sharp in Wisconsin-- and the shrinkage of union power.

• Walker’s attacks on union rights build upon his 2011 “Act 10” which simultaneously abolished almost all collective bargaining rights of public employees to union representation and drove down the take-home pay of public employees by over 10%. These attacks on public employees clearly carried a sub-text of white antagonism toward African-Americans and Latinos, argue professors Hannah Walker and Dylan Bennett because of minority workers’ concentration in the public sector and the economic anxieties of whites.

• This spring, Walker’s signed a new anti-union “right-to-work” bill—contradicting previous promise to labor leaders and the public—that will surely further weaken the already-limited bargaining power of private-sector unions. The aim of this bill, with deeply racist roots, is to drive union membership in Wisconsin to Southern-style microscopic levels.

•  Walker’s new state budget severely weakens “prevailing wage” protections for construction workers on public projects, outright elimination of the living wage concept which had been central to setting the state’s minimum wage, and the erosion of tenure and layoff protections for UW faculty.

•  Walker’s anti-worker attacks and lavish corporate subsidies handed out by his newly-privatized and scandal-wracked Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation have failed to produce the family-sustaining jobs long promised by Walker.  WEDC has been involved in providing funds for major firms shipping family-supporting jobs to offshore sites, along with aiding major Walker donors.

• He also has attacked the ‘living wage’ concept in state law. The new budget eliminates entirely a requirement that the governor consider what constitutes a “living wage” in working to establish an appropriate minimum wage for Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s minimum wage in the Walker years has been stuck at the $7.25 federal-set level, while 29 states and numerous cities have enacted far higher minimums ranging as high as $15 an hour.