New Jersey Dem Senate President Led Betrayal Of Working Families On Collective Bargaining, Pensions

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/Channels/Story.aspx?ID=1449198

6/27/2011

By Doug Cunningham

In stark contrast to Wisconsin Democrats New Jersey’s Democratic state senate president Steve Sweeney, several Democratic state senators and about a third of Democrats in the state house led a betrayal of working families to help Republicans gut public worker collective bargaining. Barabara Keshishian is President of the New Jersey Education Association. She told WBAI’s Building Bridges program that the Democrats helped impose staggering new costs on public workers while violating collective bargaining rights and defeating a millionaire’s tax that would have spread the sacrifice.

: “This bill increases worker contributions to the pension plan by forty percent while eliminating cost of living adjustments or retirees for thirty years. And then in addition to it, it eliminates collective bargaining over health care and imposes enormous increases in the cost of health care – between 300 and 500 percent increases for health care. The vast majority of Democrats are opposing this, but we have this group of ‘Christiecrats’ who are doing this. And they are unraveling collective bargaining. It’s the only state in the country where Democrats are in the lead in trying to unravel public worker collective bargaining. It’s shameful.”

[aquart]

1. Identify and primary. Nothing else will work.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. Just repeating what I heard on the radio yesterday.

Sheila Oliver, majority leader of the New Jersey Assembly, was interviewed by Mark Riley on WWRL yesterday morning (NYC). She claimed that she made a choice of the lesser of two evils. Christie told the democrats that if they vetoed his pension/benefits "reform", he find another way to "save" money and that would mean massive lay-offs of public workers. Thousands. Assuming that the dems couldn't keep the blame on Christie for the lay-offs, dems would take the blame of not protecting unions on that front. And that's why Oliver and a few other dems crossed over and voted in favor of Christie's bill.

[vi5]

4. Sounds like BS to me....

Dems control the NJ government other than the Governer's seat, correct? So how could he do anything without their enabling?

[no_hypocrisy]

5. Not disagreeing with you at all. Just wanted to show you the mindset of

the shortsighted dems who voted in favor.

[vi5]

3. Ashamed to be a NJ Democrat...

The only reason I've been even staying registered as a Dem was because as disgusted as I am with our national/federal leadership, at least I came from a solidly blue state with Democrats I could support.

We still have some good Dems here but much like at the nation level our leaders are pathetic, spineless enablers.

[LiberalEsto]

6. I used to live in Middlesex County NJ years ago

The Democrats were an embarrassment. In order to be allowed to run for local office, they had to get the approval of the late party boss David Wilentz. Decent people ran as independents, or even as Republicans against the party machine, but they usually got swamped. Some of his henchmen ended up in prison eventually.

[LiberalEsto]

7. Something similar is happening in my part of Maryland

in Montgomeery County, our Democrat-in-Name-Only County Executive Ike Leggett is busy trying to eliminate collective bargaining for county workers including police, teachers and fire and rescue personnel.

I guess these so-called Dems got the memo from the DLC.