Still don't get why you think public sector employees shouldn't be afforded the same rights/priveleges as private sector ones

The people are their employers and they voice their opinion on how much value they place on negotiations with public sector unions by who they elect to represent them

Because vital public servants are not to be offered the ability to hold the safety of the public hostage as part of their du-jour labor negotiations. Government doesn't operate on a basis that they attempt to achieve a profit, from which a union can reasonably expect to garner a fair share of the pie. Government, unlike business, takes their revenue stream by force. Allowing public sector unionism explicitly invites unions to take more and more and more, and there is nothing stopping them from getting what they want. Government doesn't go out of business if they keep caving into union demands, they simply steal more from taxpayers to pay the unions.

They also have a leverage private sector employees largely dont have. They can essentially blackmail public sector employees for favorable legislation, in WI the prison guard's union has been pushing for expanded #s of jobs and facilities for decades without the recourse of increased crime and prisoners to even come close to justifying it. Whereas a private sector employee has to bargain with their company who has a bottom line that drives most negotiations.

Fair negotiations of course do have, but rotten negotiations happen too. Whereas in the private sector the union strikes, pickets for a month, then returns with slightly increased wages and have to work 203 years to make up for lost income. Public employees cannot strike and therefore negotiations cannot reach boiling points or politicians have to answer to the constituencies and as we all know the fold long before that if they can.

For me it essentially comes down to nothing more than a disproportionate amount of leverage and the inability to strike. If government employees could strike they would have less leverage but the cost of services to the public would be too great, so they lose bargaining rights form time to time.

Since when?

I imagine some quick Googling will yield teacher strikes, nurse strikes, and even some public safety strikes.

Teacher strikes have been super-effective.

The reactionary answer to that should be remove the right to strike, not remove collective bargaining altogether.

And I see their point.

This post was edited by Skinned on Feb 13 2015 04:50pm

What is collective bargaining without the ability to strike?

Also, collective bargaining also yields workers dictating the working conditions to the employers.

@ bold: you acknowledge there is an issue with the ability to hold the public hostage?

I believe in evolution, but this is just wrong. Everything in science is debatable.

Evolution is a fact. The only debate about it is how it works.

You could debate evolution being a fact if you found some evidence to dispute it's factuality... but right now no such evidence is known to exist. So currently evolution being a factual extant phenomena is non-debatable.

These kind of misconceptions are why we have idiots preaching to 'teach the controversy' in classrooms. There is no controversy, there is no debate from people educated on the matter. Evolution is a fact - period.

This post was edited by Scaly on Feb 13 2015 08:12pm

Obviously at this point it is on the people fighting against evolution to bring evidence to the table to try and disprove it, but there have been many things considered facts in the past that have been proven wrong. Putting 100% trust into something is never a good idea

Not really. More creationist apologetics bullshit.

A fact is true regardless of what people think. Evolution is an observable recurring phenomenon like gravity.

Just because some people thought the earth was flat or that god made men out of clay does not mean that what they considered to be a fact was actually a fact. None of that is observable or testable.