Election Day in Wisconsin (11 of 11): Union messaging problems.

I've been thinking a lot about the problems of union messaging.

First off, unions are *fucked* if it's ever put to the public, whether to keep their benefits or not, since people will always vote to pay less money...

I remember at our school, some administrator sent a survey to students, whether to have one student health insurance plans at slightly higher premiums, which would give much better coverage of prescription meds and continued mental health visits, or 2 separate plans, one that had worse coverage but was cheaper, and one that had better coverage but was much more expensive.  All the students who really didn't need that coverage voted to have the 2 separate plans, and the people who had the bigger needs got screwed.

More importantly, though, I remember a story my dad told me years ago.  There was some local high school teachers union negotiation going on, and the teachers were trying to get more professional days to count towards the "180 day a year minimum amount of time kids had to be in school for the year" requirement or something like that, and when people raised an eyebrow because that lessened instruction time for kids, teachers would start saying how much extra time they put in, how they paid for all their bulletin boards in their rooms, etc.

"You got to remember," my dad told me, "You look around, most of these teachers are taking Florida vacations once a year, and most of the kids in their rooms can't do that."

He wasn't saying they were wrong, but rather that they didn't realize how good they had it, comparatively, and how their complaints came off as privileged people bitching.

Something I noticed in Wisconsin is that some of the union people (esp. teachers) come off the same way.  For example, they were saying that people who worked across the border in Illinois are getting screwed on pensions, and then they would just plunge into this mind-numbing "woe is me" complaints about how they never paid into Social Security, and their 401(k) wouldn't make up the difference, etc., and I didn't even know half the financial stuff they were talking about, since I'm not in that place in life, career-wise.

All in all, it makes you wonder, they try to get public sympathy with that?  That's very silly - no wonder people don't want to support unions.

Second, I noticed that a lot of union bumper stickers take a different tack - e.g. -

THANK UNIONS - THEY GAVE YOU THE WEEKEND

- and what's interesting about that is that instead of framing unions as special interests honing in on tax money and driving your bills up, it points out battles they fought that benefitted everyone.

Which, makes me think that the Wisconsin teachers who taught in Illinois and bitched about their pensions should change their style of bitching, and frame everything in terms of unneeded tax breaks for the wealthy, and say something like, "Oh, for years this has been guaranteed, but because the state government keeps slashing taxes for the really really wealthy, they're cutting corners with this, just like they're not filling in potholes and are closing down schools and stuff."

Bring it back to class warfare, and gain more sympathy, I think.