Life without unions

Without the pesky unions jumping up and down with their tedious moans about fairness and discrimination and all that boring red tape, you can be a creative employer.

Take the state of Wisconsin, for instance, which just abolished all its workers' rights. In this free-market paradise, things like this happen. I for one intend to move there and make some friends:

Today, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reveals that Walker is using state funds to pay more than $81,500 a year to the 26-year-old son of a major campaign donor with no college degree and two drunken-driving convictions.

Despite having almost no management experience, UW Madison college dropout Brian Deschane now oversees state environmental and regulatory issues and manages dozens of Commerce Department employees. After only two months on the job, Deschane has already received a 26 percent pay raise and a promotion.

You might call this corruption, but me and my friends in the Republican Party call it freedom.

Poor Sean Duffy

Listen to this:

I can guarantee you, or most of you, I guarantee that I have more debt than all of you. With 6 kids, I still pay off my student loans. I still pay my mortgage. I drive a used minivan. If you think I'm living high on the hog, I've got one paycheck. So I struggle to meet my bills right now. Would it be easier for me if I get more paychecks? Maybe, but at this point I'm not living high on the hog. I think you should all take a step back.

It's heartbreaking. A man who chose to have too many kids is struggling to pay his bills and we should all sympathise. His statement is in response to a man asking if it was right for a Congressman to earn such a massive multiple of the average wage.

And I would, were his 'one paycheck' not $174,000 plus the free healthcare and various benefits most Americans don't get… all provided by the US government, because Mr. Duffy is a Congressman. Not only that, but he's a Republican from Wisconsin, which has just abolished union rights to allow him reduce public workers' wages and working conditions.

"I'm attacking the leadership of the union because they're greedy, and they're selfish and they're self-interested," New Jersey's Republican Gov. Chris Christie told a conservative conference Wednesday.

A new teacher in Wisconsin earns roughly $30,000 (£18,500), rising to $50,000 (£31,000) towards the end of his/her career - without all the benefits Mr. Duffy takes home. Duffy 'earns' three times Wisconsin's median wage. The state's average wage is about $52,000.

Solidarity with the Cheeseheads

Over in Wisconsin, the Tea Party extremists have taken over the Governership. Their first major action: to withdraw virtually all fundamental workers' rights: collective bargaining has gone, salaries have been slashed, redundancy no longer has a due process, and the governor threatened his victims with military force if they dared to demonstrate against these plans.

Symbolically, the march meant that Scott Walker (the governor, not the singer) had to deliver his budget from the fortified offices of a corporation - the real source of this attack on the workers.

I don't know if any of you give a flying one about this, but you should. Wisconsin is also the home of our current government's mean-minded, petty attack on the welfare state. Globalisation proved to us how interconnected the banks and business are: it's time that workers started to globalise too. If Wisconsin's public servants can be discarded without a care, we can be too. They aren't being oppressed like the Egyptians or Saudis, but they have a righteous cause. Where they lead, we will follow.

This, by the way, is why I'm a lefty.