From Kimberley Strassel’s Friday Wall Street Journal column:
Union Busting, Massachusetts Style
The Bay State’s heavily Democratic House strips municipal employee unions of their power to bargain most health benefits.
Lede:
Pop quiz: What political party, in what state, this week passed a bill in the dead of night stripping public-sector unions of their collective- bargaining powers? Republicans in Wisconsin? The GOP in Ohio or Indiana?
Try Democrats in Massachusetts. Maybe the debate over public-sector benefits isn’t all that ideological after all.
That would be the view of Massachusetts Democratic Speaker Robert A. DeLeo, who late Tuesday led an overwhelming majority of his House in passing a bill divesting policemen, firefighters, teachers and other municipal employees of the power to collectively bargain most health-care benefits. The 111-42 vote took place at 11:30 at night, so as to avoid a mass of protesting union workers set to descend on the State House the next day. The cheek.
You can bet Bay State unions won’t turn the other.
This little twit thinks his constituency is the small group of his father’s cronies who work at the local race track.
There’s a good discussion of this over at Blue Mass Group– http://bluemassgroup.com/2011/04/no-we-are-not-all-wisconsin/
Read the comment thread, which goes an amazing 10 or 12 comments deep before anyone insults anyone else.
Yea, sort-of like the comments on Paul Krugman’s columns in the New York Times.