Sunday, March 27, 2011

The Real Benefit of Walker's Plan

Yes, there is the death-rattle-screech of public employee unions who will now have to prove their worth to members before collecting dues. And yes, contributions toward health/retirement plans carries some pain--as every working family knows.

But the real money will be saved through Rules changes.

...The key part of Walker's bargaining reform isn't making workers pay a more reasonable share of their benefits cost; the key part, rather, is letting government be managed better.

The law restricts public-sector bargaining to wages. Benefits won't be bargained, and neither will work rules. The latter is important, says Vrakas, because having to bargain for any change in how the county's work is done makes it hard to do the work better.

Thus Dan Vrakas.

That, of course, is what Vrakas meant when he said "...do more with less." While I still think that Government as a whole could do a lot LESS with less, private industry has proven--beyond a doubt--that using 5S, "Lean", and other work-simplification tools gets big results.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Absolutely, positively spot on. The retirement and insurance concessions are great, but only a small part of the pie. The sweetest piece is the fact that the legislation makes it easier for boards and local govt to make the hard decisions that should have been made for years but contract language tied hands. This is not to say that the employees will be screwed by local govt...far from it. Local boards and govt must make decisions that are right for/benefit the entire community and that includes the public employees. The overblown hype and fearmongering in the media is insulting to these local govts. Some already have been forced into the wrong decisions by this fear mongering by rushing into untennable agreements. They will pay the price at the polls, as they should, because now full responsibility for these decisions is thier's, as it should be.

neomom said...

Work rules... seems that was the biggest concession that Harley got as well.