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Labor negotiations:
What students have to say around the nation
Governors, the legislatures and unions in several Midwestern states have been waging fierce battle over the past weeks about collective bargaining issues, especially related to state employees. Presented below are a variety of excerpts from college newspapers in Wisconsin and Indiana from the past week that have commented on the collective bargaining issues.
From a column in The Lawrentian at Lawrence University:
"Over the past weeks, collective bargaining rights of public sector employees have been challenged by Gov. Scott Walker's budget repair bill. Many are protesting, and the entire situation has provoked the single most interesting exchange that Lawrence's webmail has seen in the years that I've been here.
I understand and am sympathetic to the concerns that this bill might lead the way to more states following suit and that it can severely impact the way teachers are paid.
What concerns me, though, is that we are rarely up in arms about anything, and this particular concern is just as pressing as some issues that are currently threatening to become major problems on a national level, too.
And what is perhaps more pressing is that we care a whole ton about how much teachers are getting paid, but we don't care about what they're teaching.
Legislators want to cut spending and balance a budget so they turn to education, and regardless of whether it is an attack on collective bargaining or funding, they are undervaluing a student's right to a stable and effective education.
We're not really the underdog in this situation, but I can't help but feel that the reason we're in this mess has something to do with people not valuing education in the first place."
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From a letter to the editor in the Notre Dame University paper, The Observer:
"When discussing the events revolving around the protests occurring in many state capitols such as Wisconsin and Indiana, there is a need for clarification: Unions in their entirety only represent less than one-fourth of the entire United States workforce. What does this mean? It is false when union workers claim that the bills being discussed in state capitols, which are restricting or even annihilating bargaining rights, are an assault on the rights of workers.
It's in fact a hyperbole! Doing nothing with respect to the 'rights' of the few whose salary increases every year without an end in sight despite what is going on in the rest of the economy is an actual assault on the true workforce of our great nation — small businesses, the backbone of America!
If people begin to forget this simple fact and put forward instead the agendas of power-hungry unions, then our land of opportunism has converted into the land of crybabies clamoring for what they think is rightfully theirs to keep, or as Friedrich von Hayek coins it, the road to serfdom.
I dare say that without unions, living wages would incrementally rise. With more opportunities for private individuals to invest and improve markets previously dominated by labor unions, such as transportation and public education, efficiency would rise and even more opportunities would reveal themselves.
To put this in perspective, the fundamental problem Americans face is the lack of having real choice. Parents can't choose which public school they want to send their kids to, which is why charter schools are catching on in popularity.
With our current system we are under the tyranny of monopolies, and that is why we do not need unions."
Certainly collective bargaining, the economy and the effect on public education contine as central issues nationwide just as they are at MHCC.
The Advocate reserves the right to not publish comments based on their appropriateness.