Opinion: Brown, labor have a chance to be a model
Publisher’s note: This editorial is from the Feb. 21, 2011, Sacramento Bee.
Gov. Jerry Brown offered a quick answer to the question of whether he would follow the incendiary lead of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker by moving to abolish collective bargaining rights for state workers.
“No,” Brown told reporters the other day.
Walker and other newly elected and emboldened Republican governors are using their state’s fiscal crises as an excuse to curtail or abolish public employee unions. This spectacle will embitter both sides, particularly the rank-and-file, and that’s never a good idea.
If Republican Meg Whitman had won in November, and sought to carry out her campaign promise of dismissing 40,000 state workers, California might well have been the scene of such angry protests.
Brown, by contrast, signed the original legislation during his first stint as governor granting state workers the right to collective bargaining.
There are already “angry protests” going on in California’s state capital. I would call them threats from the unions to the government that they’d better watch out and toe the line or it’ll get uglier.
Of course Brown won’t do what is being attempted in Wisconsin. He’s on the side of the unions. Always has been. And many of us will be leaving California in the coming years because of it.
Good bye then! The “protests” in the CA capitol were a show of support for the WI efforts to stop the scapegoating.