Chris Abele Has Serious Security Issues

Security officers, union members and elected
officials stand up for a living wage

When he was Milwaukee County Executive, Scott Walker had privatized the security at the behavioral health complex.  Walker's rationale for this was that it allegedly saved taxpayers money.  This was shown to be false by 2008, when security costs went over budget by more than a half million dollars.

That extra money was not going to the security officers themselves, who were making more than five dollars less an hour than the county workers that had filled the duty.  So where was all that money going? I don't know.  But I do know that the owner of Orion Security, the company that has the security contract, is reported to have just built a very nice and very large house in the exurbs.

Despite efforts to have the situation improve for the security officers at the complex, nothing has changed over the years.

On Monday, a number of the security officers made a direct action to protest the unfair labor practices of Orion Security and to demand a living wage and the right to unionize, much like the protests that have been seen nationwide and globally, from fast food restaurants to Walmart workers.

Sadly, because these security officers dared to stand up for themselves and their coworkers, at least four officers had been illegally fired already. One of the people that had been fired was also a leading voice in the fight for a living wage which was waged last year and earlier this year.

Ironically, there has been reported that Orion has agreed to pay their officers $10.10 per hour, nearly a two dollar an hour raise.  Don't believe for one hot second that this happened because they are a benign and generous company.

What makes these events even more significant is that the word in the smoky courthouse halls is that Milwaukee County Emperor Chris Abele wants to privatize the security in the courthouse, the last place that is still staffed by county employed security officers.

Walker had tried to privatize these jobs as well while he was county executive. As one might have expected, Walker was more worried about appeasing a campaign contributor than doing things correctly.  As a result, the county had to hire the laid off security officers back while maintaining the contract with the privatization company, Wackenhut.  To make things even more interesting, Sheriff David Clarke felt it necessary to post his deputies at the same spots that the county employed and Wackenhut employed security officers were.

This meant that taxpayers were paying for three agencies to guard the same entrances.

Given that Abele has the same value system as his good friend Walker, but with even less understanding of how government works, I expect that Abele's fiasco will be at least as glorious as Walker's debacle.

The gentle reader shouldn't kid themselves either.  Abele, like Walker, is not motivated by any sense of being fiscally conservative. Abele's motivation is to keep the money where it belongs, with plutocrats and oligarchs like himself and his friends.  Abele is a pro-poverty plutocrat if there ever was one.  It's not coincidental that people call him the Mitt Romney of Milwaukee County.

But how much do you want to bet that despite Abele's false claims of being fiscally conservative or watching out for the taxpayer, he wouldn't spend a second entertaining the thought that the guards in his own personal security force - which he wanted taxpayers to shell out nearly another half a million dollars - should get paid poverty-level wages?

It does take a lot of gall on Abele's part to think that he is worth the best protection that the taxpayers can buy, but that the rest of us, including our most vulnerable citizens, aren't worth even the bare minimum.

Antonin Scalia: Union Hero?!

I would never have expected this in a million years:

Illinois grants public-sector unions the right to exclusive representation—meaning that if they receive a majority vote, they automatically represent all employees—and lets them charge a “fair share” fee to employees who don’t join the union but are covered by the collective bargaining agreement. The broader question raised in the case is whether or not any public-sector union should enjoy these rights. This issue would affect every local, state and federal union in the country.

The challenge was brought by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW), an anti-union group whose mission “is to eliminate coercive union power and compulsory unionism abuses through strategic litigation, public information and education programs.” In a typical NRTW case this November, attorney William Messenger argued unsuccessfully before the Supreme Court that unions should not have the right to negotiate card check and neutrality agreements. Yesterday, Messenger tried to convince the Court that exclusive representation and fair share fees by public sector unions violate workers’ First Amendment rights. He claimed that, because public employee unions bargain over matters of public concern, the fees force workers to contribute to speech with which they may not agree.

But Justice Scalia was having none of it. Though Scalia is often cast as an ideological enemy of all labor—Salon stories by Josh Eidelson on this case and the neutrality agreement case, respectively, were titled, “Scalia’s Golden Chance to Kill Unions” and “Scalia’s Chance to Smash Unions”—here Scalia did not join with Justices Alito, Roberts and Kennedy in advancing the NRTW argument. Rather, Scalia was quick to question the very premise of the NRTW’s case, in a manner that set the tone for the remainder of the proceedings.

Scalia turned the NRTW argument on its head by raising the hypothetical of a policeman who, after asking a dozen times for a raise, was denied access to the police commissioner. Did he have his First Amendment rights violated? The answer was no. With this device, Justice Scalia highlighted how the Supreme Court has recognized that the government has wider latitude in dealing with its employees than in dealing with its citizenry. The police commissioner telling his secretary that he didn’t want to speak with his subordinate no more violated the policeman’s First Amendment rights than charging healthcare workers a fair share fee for union representation does theirs.

At one point in the arguments, when Justice Kagan suggested that Scalia believed that the NRTW position was valid, Scalia interrupted to clarify, stating, “I want to hear the answer, too, because, contrary to what Justice Kagan suggests, I didn’t say your First Amendment argument was valid ... I said at least it was a comprehensible argument.”

When the NRTW attorney suggested that the way homecare workers negotiate for higher wages was not internal workplace speech, but rather more highly protected political speech, Scalia objected, saying, “Why isn’t it? I mean, it is for private employers.” Scalia went on to suggest that employers may stand to gain by having their workforce represented by a single union. “There are some private employers who think they’re better off with a closed shop and they just want to deal with one union. ... They do this as private employers because they think it is in their interest as an employer. Why can’t the government have the same interest?” Coming from Scalia, these arguments have far more force than they would from one of the more liberal justices.

The article also says that Scalia is against allowing people to have a free ride, meaning that freeloaders should have to pay for the representation they enjoy.

This kind of confirms the adage that truth is stranger than fiction. It also shows that this isn't such a bad thing.

It should be interesting to see how this might affect Act 10.