What good is a union and/or a Scott Walker?

An estimated 50,000 protestors demonstrated before the Wisconsin capitol in Madison on Saturday.

In the same way that the foreign exchange student was weirdly the most candid person at your high school, foreign news services are a great way to catch up on long-running* stories that you somehow missed. Besides describing state senators’ flight to Illinois as “an almost comic move,” this article from the Guardian neatly sums up what’s going on in Wisconsin. Perhaps you’ve heard about this, but they’ve got some law up there nobody can agree about. Newly-elected governor Scott Walker, with the support of a Republican senate, wants to address the state’s budget shortfall by cutting benefits to schoolteachers and other state employees. He also wants to eliminate collective bargaining rights for same. Exactly what teachers’ right to negotiate as a union might have to do with the state’s fiscal problems is just one of the many fun complications people are yelling about in Wisconsin.

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