Uppity Wisconsin

“For an adult with a family who has to pay for food, clothing, and a place to live, and be able to pay for a car, the minimum wage is clearly not high enough,” wrote Bethany of Eleva-Strum High School.

Wisconsin was one of the first states to enact a Living Wage. The law gave authority for determining a living wage to an Industrial Commission made up of a balance of employers, employees and the public. The year was 1913.

Two years earlier, people attending a national conference of the National Consumers’ League in Milwaukee called for a minimum wage. Advocates made a minimum wage the top issue.

Ideological groups push de-licensing plan

By

Senator Kathleen Vinehout

“This bill does not allow for public debate...is the public even aware? You’re not allowing the public to have adequate input into this issue,” testified Stephanie Bloomingdale.

Ms. Bloomingdale is the Secretary-Treasurer of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO. She represented many workers who, along with the rest of us, just found out about bills that set up a process to get rid of occupational licensing.

“Friends in the Wisconsin Legislature, we beg you: Sign that bad deal with Foxconn,” recently wrote the Chicago Sun Times editorial board. “It’s the neighborly thing to do.”

The Wisconsin Assembly obliged the Chicago newspaper and recently voted 50-39 to approve the Governor’s deal with the Taiwanese company, Foxconn.

But lawmakers were not voting on the deal itself. Contract negotiations are presumably underway. Legislators who voted on the deal did not see the contract, they do not know the details under negotiation, nor will they approve the final negotiated contract.

By

Senator Kathleen Vinehout

“I lost my granddaughter to heroin addiction,” Anita told me. “We’ve lost so many people,” Tena added.

Recently, former Marine Tena Quackenbush and her friends, including Quincy Garvin, Jasime Funmaker, Lori Pettibone, Cindy Ward hosted a gathering to promote and encourage recovery from addiction, especially the scourge of heroin addiction.

Dana Wachs has officially announced that he is running for governor. I thought that perhaps Dana was serious about this once he announced that his law firm had merged with another firm, freeing him up to take a leave from his firm. This is now what is happening. Dana would be a great governor, and I find myself in the unaccustomed position of having two people who I count as friends potentially running for governor, and tilting the political center of the state much more seriously toward the left coast.

I am excited to see Dana running, but I find myself a little torn in that I'm not at all sure how I will feel in the primary if both Dana Wachs and Kathleen Vinehout end up running. 

We've been seeing more and more of this throughout the Walker administration - Public hearings that really don't qualify as public hearings. Yesterday's Foxconn bill public hearing was, as is typical now, stacked. Invited spearkers (meaning those in favor of the bill) spoke for eight hours, from 1:30 to 9:30, and then the public was allowed to testify.

By that point, of course, most of the public had gotten the message, thrown up their hands, and had gone home. Exactly the intended effect. These are not public hearings, they are GOP press conferences with a few questions from the public tacked on to the end.

Here we go again - emergency legislation for something that really requires some thought - or at least reading the bill. The Governor has ordered up a special legislative session tomorrow morning to consider the "Foxconn Bill" to offer money, tax breaks, and the ability to run over the environent in Southeast Wisconsin.  Somewhere. We'll figure out all that stuff later, the important thing is to hand everything we can over to Foxconn so we can serve them better. 

All of Wisconsin is apparently agog over the Foxconn plant announcement that is coming this afternoon. Still, color me skeptical. Rumors are that Wisconsin is offering a huge tax break to Foxconn in return for building the plant, and the state has certainly paved the way by stomping on unions and generally making the living wage a past dream, something that Foxconn is certainly going to appreciate. But rumors abound that the state is offering somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000 per job in tax "bounty" for the plant. I'm not sure that the state will be able to actually agree to pony up a tax break that big, particularly in view of the current inability to pass a state budget even without the complication of a huge tax break for business.

A press conference is being held to announce information on the Senate's verrsion of the state budget.  Live on Wiseye's Facebook page.  https://www.facebook.com/WisconsinEye/  -- looks about ready to start.