September 14, 2015

Scott Walker Is Committed to Making Your Life “Flexible”

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Scott Walker has released a new plan to empower workers. Paul Waldman has the details, but I’ll save you the trouble of reading if you just want the highlights. Here they are:

union bosses and the politicians they puppet….power to the people, not the union  bosses….reduce the power of union bosses….big-government union bosses….big-government union bosses….Individuals should not have to pay union bosses….union bosses a legal monopoly over collective bargaining….mandatory dues to the union bosses….pay artificially high wages to union bosses.

flexibility, choice, and innovation in the workplace….free enterprise and workplace flexibility….flexibility to join a union or not….protect workplace flexibility….flexibility to balance work and life commitments….repeal any regulation that reduces employee flexibility….protect workplace flexibility.

I think that just about covers it. Walker wants to crush unions and give workers the flexibility to be free of bothersome regulations about stuff like overtime pay, sick leave, parental leave, sexual harassment, and so forth. Can you feel the flexibility? It sounds like nirvana, doesn’t it?

But don’t worry. Walker’s plan will make corporate bosses1 so happy that they’ll probably start treating everybody like princes just out of the sheer joy of doing well by their workers. That’s how it was before all this unionizing and government regulating took over America. Right?

1That is, the kind that most of us actually work for and have to deal with on a daily basis.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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