If you want a good measure of how deeply the collective bargaining bill in Wisconsin has disrupted public sector unions, there is no better example than the Wisconsins Education Association Council (WEAC).
Last month WEAC announced that it was laying off 40% of its staff. With little over which to collectively bargain, and with dues no longer withheld from paychecks, the need for and sustainability of a union bureaucracy could not be justified.
Now WEAC is being boycotted by National Staff Organization (NSO), a union representing educational union employees.
Isn’t that great, education union employees have their own union? Is there a union for employees of education union employee unions?
Anyway (via JSOnline), NSO is urging its members to boycott WEAC because of the layoffs, which NSO claims are in breach of employee contracts.:
Because the Wisconsin Education Association Council is breaching staff contracts and destroying any working relationship with its employees, NSO President Chuck Agerstrand is cautioning all NSO members against applying for staff vacancies.
“WEAC management is taking a page out of Gov. Walker’s playbook and making up new employment rules not in the USU contract. They should be looking to the 42 employees they laid off to fill vacancies before they go outside the state,” said Agerstrand.
WEAC recently sent out a job posting for a staff position in the Racine UniServ office. WEAC’s new employment rule—which violates the WEAC/USU contract—says an employee must have successfully passed a year’s probation in the job he/she wants to bump into or the employee has no recall rights. The USU is challenging the management’s position.
Agerstrand is encouraging support for our NSO members. “I’m asking NSO members to show support for our Wisconsin USU brothers and sisters by refraining from applying for any position in Wisconsin until our colleagues have their position restored.”
On Aug. 15, 40 percent of WEAC’s employees received layoff notices—four days after the staff was made aware of impending layoffs. WEAC’s Executive Director Dan Burkhalter blamed Walker’s budget cuts for the layoffs.
I’ve been search for a better metaphor, but “feeding on each other” was the best I could come up with. Any suggestions?
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Cannibalism/Cannibalize.
Beat me to it! Hope they continue to “feed” on themselves.
I don’t have time to search for hyperlinks, but I distinctly remember seeing reports about leftist organizations engaging in employment practices that the Left relishes denouncing.
Thought I saw something about SEIU and some other big unions and not taking kindly to organizing. There were also stories, as I recall, about Acorn violating the living daylights out of minimum wage laws.
Yes, both true.
John Stewart had his roving reporter do a fantastic bit on the SEIU. SEIU was picketing something, but all of the picketers were hired day laborers rather than being SEIU members. The report highlighted the difference between the work rules the SEIU was demanding for themselves with how they were actually treating the day laborers they were paying to be in the picket line. They ended the segment by do a fake bit about organizing the day laborers into their own union.
Seriously though, what better way to screw with a union than to organize their employees into their own union?
“Feed on, cannabalize,” whatever, works for me. For an added snicker or two, Hillary is 44 has a post on how Daily Kooks are feeding on each other on the hollering of “waaaaaacist.”
http://www.hillaryis44.org/2011/09/12/the-daily-kook-klutz-klan-and-republican-debate-night/
Cannibal #1: Your wife sure makes good soup.
Cannibal #2: Yeah. I sure am going to miss her.
Just say, “It’s for the children!”
Is there a union for employees of education union employee unions?
It’s turtles all the way down.
Beautiful! Haven’t laughed this hard in months at the Turtles comment!
One word: ouroboros.
Hopefully, the cycle will end sooner than later.
Unions were a perturbation which triggered a necessary adjustment of our system; but, they never offered a stable solution to resolve the issues they purported to represent. Unions serving civil servants should be illegal in our representative republic.
DOOM infighting
how about “catabolic”?
it is a lovely word for what, in this instance, is a lovely process. in the medical field, it’s usually a bad thing for patients, but that’s different.
Like animals, they eat their own.
The rattlesnakes are biting each other.
The Bureau of Redundant Redundancy Bureaus has been found to be redundant.
All Redundant Redundancy Bureaucrats report to their local Redundant Bureaucrat Redundancy Relocation Bureau.
Have a nice day.
I’d suggest the image of a snake eating its own tail for the public service union catabolism, but there’s one fundamental problem with the simile:
Not everyone detests snakes.
Cannabilistic feral hogs. Fattened at the public trough. Strokes. Heart attacks. Glad they have those “cadillac” health plans. Maybe this would be a good 5th installment for the Resident Evil series – Hogs Gone Wild!
Starving feral hogs: I believe you’ve nailed it. Well done!
Parasites of parasites (like two mirrors facing each other, fading into eternity).
I LOL’d at the turtles comment though.
Actually, Instapudit nailed it with a partial quote from De Morgan’s improvement on Dean Swift’s lines. A fuller version of the quote is:
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
Yupper. Each part of Wisconsin is divided into “Uniserves” which is a geographically collected group of teachers unions. Rather like each school district has a union for that school district. These Uniserves each has a director, and all the directors in a Wisconsin belongs to a union of uniserve directors. Believe you me, they are well paid. They help coordinate settlements, making sure this school district matches what surrounding school districts pay. So that is probably different from the union of office employees, which I believe this article refers to.
I was always curious about this: UAW represents all auto-workers, or the organized ones, anyhow. There isn’t a Ford UAW or a GM UAW. So why didn’t all the teachers in a county belong to the same union instead of having a different union for each school district?
Most school districts have a teachers union, a secretaries union, and custodian union, a school kitchen workers union, and so on. Madison has one union for all their employees, so things are different there. When my former school district hastily re-negotiated and signed contracts with their employees before the new bargaining law went into effect, the union of the para-educators posted on Facebook: “Our board came through for us.” Isn’t the school board the public’s school board?
How bout “The parasite devouring the host, which in this case is another parasite.”
From Mississippi Burning, “The rattlesnakes are committing suicide.”
Dung beetles eating other dung beetles’ dung, and beetles dung, ad. infinitum?
[…] PROF. JACOBSON: Wisconsin Unions Start Feeding On Themselves. […]
” BURP “
AP link for NY – 9 results
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/files/elections/2011/by_county/NY_US_House_0913.html?SITE=AP&SECTION=POLITICS
[…] William A. Jacobson: If you want a good measure of how deeply the collective bargaining bill in Wisconsin has disrupted […]
Two ticks and no dog.
LOL.. I could not hear better news, than that.. Love it.. Let’s all hope the Teachers Unions, are all disbanded..
Then next, the Police and Firefighters Unions, must be neutralized.. or disbanded.. as they are used against the People of Wisconsin.. They either work for the People, or they work for the Unions.. they must make up their minds, as they can’t have it both ways any longer.!
“I was always curious about this: UAW represents all auto-workers, or the organized ones, anyhow. There isn’t a Ford UAW or a GM UAW. So why didn’t all the teachers in a county belong to the same union instead of having a different union for each school district?”
More union employees at the admin level, plain & simple.
When you are a member of a union, you are in a union, a union employee is in a union union, and one that is employed by a union union is in a union union union.
Just like when a prisoner in gaol who commits a crime is sent to prison prison and if he commits another there, he goes to prison prison prison.
It’s all so simple, you see.
[…] Read it. Last month WEAC announced that it was laying off 40% of its staff. With little over which to collectively bargain, and with dues no longer withheld from paychecks, the need for and sustainability of a union bureaucracy could not be justified. […]
Considering the critical thinking capability of unions, & their insatiable appetite for capturing new members (paricularly in the government employees sector) who don’t want to join, perhaps ‘zombies’ would be a better term.
[…] Heh: Wisconsin unions start feeding on each other […]
I Used to be in union until I got screwed. Here is the establishment union philosophy when cornered:
Protect the top 10% membership, throw anyone under the bus to protect them or their self created privileges/entitlements.
Those on top (SENIORS) make the rules based on their personal conveniences and needs, they use the “seniority” argument to justify any discriminatory behavior within the union.
They negotiate contracts with the their needs and interest in mind first and foremost, if that happens to be in the interest of those of the bottom “GREAT” if not, “TOO BAD”
They want everyone to pay the same dues, but they do not offer the same rights, respect, or dignity to the people on the bottom of the seniority list.
Is the most discriminatory entity I’ve ever been involved with and is legal!!!
[…] Wisconsin unions start feeding on each other By William A. Jacobson – LegalInsurrection.com If you want a good measure of how deeply the collective bargaining bill in Wisconsin has disrupted public sector unions, there is no better example than the Wisconsins Education Association Council (WEAC). Last month WEAC announced that it was laying off 40% of its staff. With little over which to collectively bargain, and with dues no longer withheld from paychecks, the need for and sustainability of a union bureaucracy could not be justified. Now WEAC is being boycotted by National Staff Organization (NSO), a union representing educational union employees. Isn’t that great, education union employees have their own union? Is there a union for employees of education union employee unions? […]
[…] There is a strange parallel in the case of the Wisconsin teachers union being boycotted by its own union. […]
[…] Megan McArdle/The Atlantic A fascinating study in modern industrial organization: If you want a good measure of how deeply the collective bargaining bill in Wisconsin has disrupted […]
Here is the interesting thing about the Milwaukee Public Teacher’s union. They refused to agree to contributing 5.8% to their pension annually which would save 200 teaching positions. What these stories never tell is that MPS teachers do not just have one pension but two.
•State Pension. Teachers belong to the Wisconsin state pension plan. That plan requires a 6.8% employer contribution and 6.2% from the employee. However, according to the collective-bargaining agreement in place since 1996, the district pays the employees’ share as well, for a total of 13%.
•Teachers’ Supplemental Pension. In addition to the state pension, Milwaukee public-school teachers receive an additional pension under a 1982 collective-bargaining agreement. The district contributes an additional 4.2% of teacher salaries to cover this second pension. Teachers contribute nothing.
•Classified Pension. Most other school employees belong to the city’s pension system instead of the state plan. The city plan is less expensive but here, too, according to the collective-bargaining agreement, the district pays the employees’ 5.5% share.
[…] Wisconsin unions start feeding on each other […]
[…] law professor William A. Jacobson, in his blog Legal Insurrection, asks this question: Isn’t that great, education union employees have their own union? Is there a […]
[…] law professor William A. Jacobson, in his blog Legal Insurrection, asks this question: Isn’t that great, education union employees have their own union? Is there a […]
[…] Link: Legal Insurrection. […]
[…] on the eve of the 2012 campaign season.”There is a sort of strange parallel in the case of the Wisconsin teachers union being boycotted by its own union.It all sounds a little like self-destruction… Read More Jehuda is an attorney and TV […]