Fair game for Wisconsin's public unions
The ethical line between Fred Phelps’ anti-gay protesters who disrupt the funerals of soldiers killed in action, and the self-righteous union protesters opposing Wisconsin’s governor Scott Walker’s budget balancing efforts has thinned to the vanishing point.
On Friday, Walker visited the Messmer Catholic Preparatory School in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, to read to third-graders. The third-graders have no political agenda, but 100 protesters felt it was appropriate to disrupt a special day for school children to show their hatred for the governor.
Just as the Westboro Baptist Church feels that its homophobic crusade justifies interfering with military families’ private grief, Wisconsin’s ethically tone-deaf unions feel that innocent student are appropriate collateral damage in their quest to hold on to their privileged status among Wisconsin workers, and elections, laws, deficits and common sense be damned. How especially cynical of the teachers unions, to disrupt the experience of Catholic school students, who, apparently, don’t count. Tell us again, you dedicated teachers, how it’s “all for the children.”
As an extra vivid demonstration of how low they can sink, one of the protesters vandalized the school, gluing the doors shut to prevent Walker from entering. Brother Bob Smith, the president of the Messmer schools, told a reporter that one demonstrator confided in him that he should “get ready for a riot.”
At an elementary school. Nice.
I know what the public union protesters will say. They will exclaim, “What? How dare you compare us to Phelps’s vile crazies! We’re fighting for fair working conditions! They are fighting for bigotry!”
They are, but that misses the point. Both groups fervently believe their cause is just, both believe that it is so just that it excuses suspending basic principles of fairness and decency, and both are willing to harm innocent bystanders for their own agendas. In fact, I could argue that Phelps and his merry bigots are the more ethical of the two: at least they are trying, however insanely, to save the world from damnation. The protesters at the Messmer Catholic Preparatory School just don’t want to contribute their own pensions.
Brother Smith, who has some scholarship in right and wrong, said that the Republican governor’s visit to read to students was unrelated to the rollback of collective bargaining rights for many public workers, and that the school was not the proper place for a protest.
“People ought to start acting like adults,” he said.
I’d put it a little differently.
Public unions should not make non-combatants, especially children, suffer for their political objectives.
Public unions ought to stop acting like the Westboro Baptist Church.
Ethics Alarms 
I agree with your post, with one correction. The teachers agreed to pay more to the pension fund. They are demonstrating to regain their collective bargaining rights.
I don’t understand, Jan.. Both were provisions of the law passed and signed. In what sense did they “agree”? And I have a correction for you: there are no collective bargaining “rights” for public employees.
The public employees agreed to increases in their contributions to the pension fund before the law was passed. The thing that broke the deal was that they wanted to retain their collective bargaining “power,” if that’s a better word.
MUCH better. Thanks.
We need to establish what collective bargaining “rights” actually are.
If it was merely the right for employees to choose someone to bargain with their employer on their behalf, then laws prohibiting that would not likely survive judicial review.
But the “right” is really an entitlement for the collective bargainer to have exclusive rights to bargain with the employer. Individual employees are prohibited from withdrawing from the collective and bargaining with the employer on their own, or in a rival collective.
Indeed. Collective bargaining privileges, protected by laws, actually take away individual rights to make a contract. It may be a good tradeoff, but using the term “rights” is too close to an oxymoron for me.
Which is completely absurd, as competition is good for markets.
But those are private school children. They don’t count.
First class blog post!!!