Madison, WI (October 20, 2011)<\/b> \u2013 With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, three Wisconsin public employees affected by Wisconsin\u2019s recent public-sector unionism reforms have filed an amicus curiae<\/i> brief in federal court asking the judge to uphold the new law and deny the unions’ request to suspend the law.<\/p>\n
Pleasant Prairie teacher Kristi Lacroix, Waukesha high school teacher Nathan Berish, and trust fund specialist at the Wisconsin Department of Employee Trust Funds Ricardo Cruz filed the brief late last week in favor of the reforms which sharply limited government union officials’ monopoly bargaining power over public workers and taxpayers.<\/p>\n
The teachers object to the union’s use of their forced union dues for the union’s political activities. In a recent legal brief, union officials admitted that under the reforms public-sector union bosses would lose at least a quarter of their forced-union-dues revenues. For example, Wisconsin teacher union bosses would not be able to force independent-minded teachers to pay $5.4 million in forced dues and $375,000 for teacher union boss political activism, thus highlighting the need for a Right to Work law for Wisconsin\u2019s workers \u2013 in both the public and private sectors.<\/p>\n
All three workers want to exercise the freedom to represent themselves with their employers, stating in their brief that \u00abthey equate the ‘services’ provided by (union officials) to be akin to those of some itinerant street window washers who sling dirty water on your car windshield, smear it around, and then demand payment.\u00bb The three public employees also filed a motion to intervene in the same case in mid-July. The judge has yet to rule on their motion.<\/p>\n
In June, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Governor Scott Walker’s government-sector monopoly bargaining reform bill, which protects the Right to Work for most government employees and bans automatic forced-union-dues seizures from public employees’ paychecks. In response, union lawyers filed a new lawsuit in federal court seeking to overturn the law.<\/p>\n
\u00abThese courageous workers carry on the fight to uphold their Right to Work for all of Wisconsin’s civil servants who want nothing to do with union bosses’ so-called ‘representation’,\u00bb said Mark Mix, President of National Right to Work. \u00abWith the help of the National Right to Work Foundation, these workers are prepared to withstand Big Labor’s all-out assault to restore its forced-dues privileges over Wisconsin\u2019s public workers.\u00bb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Madison, WI (October 20, 2011)<\/b> \u2013 With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, three Wisconsin public employees affected by Wisconsin\u2019s recent public-sector unionism reforms have filed an amicus curiae<\/i> brief in federal court asking the judge to uphold the new law and deny the unions’ request to suspend the law.<\/p>\n
Pleasant Prairie teacher Kristi Lacroix, Waukesha high school teacher Nathan Berish, and trust fund specialist at the Wisconsin Department of Employee Trust Funds Ricardo Cruz filed the brief late last week in favor of the reforms which sharply limited government union officials’ monopoly bargaining power over public workers and taxpayers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[888],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n