Boston Globe:

House votes to restrict unions

Measure would curb bargaining on health care

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

The 111-to-42 vote followed tougher measures to broadly eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states. But unlike those efforts, the push in Massachusetts was led by Democrats who have traditionally stood with labor to oppose any reduction in workers’ rights.

Unions fought hard to stop the bill, launching a radio ad that assailed the plan and warning legislators that if they voted for the measure, they could lose their union backing in the next election. After the vote, labor leaders accused House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo and other Democrats of turning their backs on public employees.

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This society simply promised too much when largess seemed possible, and whether this was done cynically for political support, contributions, or votes, or good intentions, SIMPLY DOESN’T MATTER. Like the society which borrowed against rising land values, and met crisis when that could not continue, or banks that hedged with the same and had no margin to cover the drop’s consequences, public institutions now find that without the benefit of a continual rise, insufficiently measured pension, health and other promises simply are not possible to keep without ensuring that other such promises cannot be extorted by public unions.

It STINKS, but that is HOW IT IS, and HOW IT HAS TO BE.

This story, however, highlights the cynical manipulations of democrats in other states to pummel republicans over this precise issue. We will end up with a public that doesn’t care, and a nation that falls.

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