March 03, 2011 07:11 PM UTC

So You Like Trashing Public Employees, Do You?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Here’s a report from our friends at the Washington Post that local “Tea Party” types–like Sen. Shawn Mitchell and his close friend from the Colorado Union of Taxpayers, Gregory Golyansky–should probably take note of before somebody goes all “storm troopers of communism” in front of a microphone again.

[T]he forthcoming NBC/WSJ poll, like other previously released surveys, will show strong public opposition to rolling back public employee bargaining rights:

In the poll, a whopping 68 percent find it acceptable requiring public employees to contribute more of their pay for retirement benefits; 63 percent are fine with requiring these employees to pay more for their health-care benefits; and 58 percent are OK with freezing public employees’ salaries for one year.

But just 33 percent say it’s acceptable — and 62 percent say it’s unacceptable — to eliminate these employees’ collective-bargaining rights as way to deal with state budget deficits.

…It asks whether people find it acceptable to “eliminate public employees’ right to collectively bargain over health care, pensions and other benefits when negotiating a union contract.”

That wording is a pretty fair approximation of what’s being proposed in Wisconsin. So this should silence the talk in some quarters that polls showing strong support for the public employees are rooted in the public’s lack of understanding of the issue. What’s more, this is now the fourth national poll to find the public supports public employees against governors looking to roll back their bargaining rights. Gallup, the New York Times and Pew (to a slightly lesser degree) have all found the same.

As it turns out, voters don’t wonder why the right wing protester above “outsources our jobs,” or why a vice president of the Colorado Union of Taxpayers, an organization dozens of Colorado Republican elected officials swear fealty to, calls public employees “scum.”

They certainly do get it, and they don’t like it.