Connecticut residents are awaiting the results of the second vote of its state’s unions on a concessions package that will, allegedly, allow rank and file union members to participate in the “shared sacrifice” of Governor Dannel Malloy’s budget. To the dismay of the Democratic-led legislature, their Democratic governor, and union leaders, state workers voted to reject the package in late June, leading the coalition of union leaders to change their bylaws and lower the bar required for ratification of contracts to a simple majority.

Obviously, union leaders knew their members were unhappy with, or perhaps unaccustomed to, having to make concessions. Requiring less of them to accept it should do the trick and ensure a successful vote, right?

While the governor has done his urging through threats of thousands of continued layoffs and elimination of some state services, Connecticut state workers have also received encouragement to vote, “Yes,” from outside the state’s borders.

In an editorial in the Hartford Courant‘s online edition, Wisconsin union leaders Marty Beil, executive director of Council 24 of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, and Michael Thomas, president of the SEIU Wisconsin State Council, urged Connecticut unions to accept the concessions package because, quite frankly, they’re jealous they couldn’t get a deal as good as this one.

The union leaders write:

“We know that the proposed agreement contains real sacrifices, but we also know that it contains four years of job security, offered nowhere else in the country; and extension of your pension, health and retiree health contract; and has good wage increases in the latter years.

Like Connecticut’s working families, we are outraged by the direction our country has moved in, by how much is asked from middle-class workers and how little from billionaires like the Koches [sich]. There is a long fight ahead before working families in Connecticut, Wisconsin or anywhere in our nation will again be treated the way we ought to be.”

Let’s “decipher” some of this:


– “Four years of job security, offered nowhere else in the country…”

Certainly not in the private sector…

– “Extension of your pension, health, and retiree health contract…”

So that, when Connecticut state workers retire, they will have a high income and top-level health insurance, even as many of them move to Florida to avoid paying Connecticut’s now-increased-even-more state income tax…

– “Good wage increases in the latter years…”

So that pensions can be the highest amount possible, based on an average of the last three years of active employment…

– “Working families…”

That’s state union workers and their families…the people who pay for all these benefits and mandates, i.e., taxpayers- they’re not “working families…”

– “…working families…will again be treated the way we ought to be…”

It’s hard to hear the word, “service,” in the phrase, “public service.” People who have been taught that they are entitled have little, if any, insight into what that means.

Sounds like Wisconsin unions are suffering from “contract envy.”