Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Who Is Worse To Workers - Scott Walker or Chris Abele?

As I had noted, I attended the Milwaukee County Board's Budget Hearing on Monday evening.

During the hearing, infamous real life troll Orville Seymer of the grossly misnamed Citizens for Responsible Government lashed out at the Board, specifically targeting Chairwoman Marina Dimitrijevic.  But Seymer also demonstrated that his ignorance is vast by attacking county workers, claiming that they are underworked and overpaid.

Unsurprisingly, he is dead wrong.

This chart is from an EPI briefing paper and the pre-Act 10 days:

Click to embiggen
The chart shows that before Act 10, public sector workers did get better benefits than private sector workers.  The trade off is that the public sector workers also got lower wages and did not get things like Christmas bonuses to enhance the income.

But since Act 10, the benefits have been greatly lowered and the cost for them have skyrocketed, meaning that public sector workers not only get much lower pay but also have reduced benefits.  This is why there is a growing turnover in the public sector that one wouldn't normally see.

No where in the state is that more true than in Milwaukee County.  I have often said that Milwaukee County Emperor Chris Abele is actually worse than Scott Walker.  People have scoffed at me when I made these statements, but the following chart, which comes from Abele's own 2014 budget, shows how the fringe benefits for county employees stack up to those for state workers and employees of the City of Milwaukee:

Again, click on image to embiggen
As the gentle reader can see, in almost every category, county employees are not only paying more for their benefits, they are paying extremely more.  I would also point out that state employees are paid more money than county workers, making the percentage of county employee checks being taken out that much larger.

Abele claims he needs to do this to set the county on the "right path" towards financial solvency.  Yet neither Tom Barrett or even Scott Walker need to be so draconian to their workers to balance their budgets.  Abele however feels that he cannot perform his duties unless his aides get paid in excess of $120,000.  He is also able to find the money to help build a 44-story Bic lighter and move freeway ramps that will benefit his friends at the Greater Milwaukee Committee as well as his own ventures.

Now, the county board has done some work to alleviate the extraordinary and unfair burden that Abele has put on county workers, but it's still not exactly anything to brag about:


While it's considerably better than what Abele wants to do to the workers, it's still like being told you're only going to receive 15 lashes of the whip instead of 50.

In summary, one can see that the supposedly Democratic and self-claimed progressive Abele is already much worse to workers than Walker ever dreamed of being.  And that doesn't even begin to talk about what Abele wants to do to workers rights and civil service laws.

1 comment:

  1. What a fraud Mr. 1% Abele has turned out to be. Just another bait-and-switcher who ran a stealth campaign.

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