JimofCamden

New Jersey state government is wrong in passing the legislation they propose that fixes the terms of pension and health care benefits for public employees. This violates these public employees rights to collective bargain the U.S. Federal and N.J. state constitution may not provide such a right but natural law does because work is too important too life wages and benefit are too important to this issue and because employers have so much power in this employee/employer relationship collective bargaining is the only means to counter that power and reliably give the employee a chance for a fair deal.

This law is wrong because it takes away rights from public workers but not private workers. Okay maybe the terms of the bill are overall reasonable under America's really hurting economy if and only if the whole legislation expires after four years (its preposterous to have no COLA on pensions indefinitely) excluding the provisions dictating that doctors and hospitals outside of New Jersey are out-of-network this is completely wrong if a public worker has a serious illness he or she should be free to get the best doctor and best treatment he or she can there shouldn't be this parochial restriction this issue is too important to that worker. Also, this legislation is a bad precedent what's to stop future governors and state legislatures now that they've established that they can control benefit costs for "public" employees through law from continually rolling them back eventually make it so public workers have no pensions and only catastrophic health care insurance America knows the character of American politicians if they can sell someone out to save their own skin/reelection (and not have to raise taxes or hurt a powerful special interests) they will!

The "live within what government can afford" motives of government are completely understandable. What Trenton and some other state governments like Trenton should be doing if they want to get a handle on the problem is respect the collective bargaining process they should say we the legislature and governor are going to sit across the table from the public employee unions and collectively bargain as we should. To do this they could pass the legislation they intend but have a provision in the bill that respective provisions in this bill are not applicable if there is a collective a bargaining agreement entered into after enactment of this law and the legislature and governor have approved the agreement in the same manner as passage of a law and if the legislature and governor have failed to vote/sign such an agreement sixty days from it being entered into the agreement will be deemed to have the necessary waivers from the legislation and so Trenton doesn't have to vote on every little municipality union contract across the state the law can deem that once twenty percent of municipality agreements have gone through this review process those reviewed agreement will set the waiver standards Trenton will not have to do any more reviews, for all state public union agreement though Trenton will have to do the reviews. If Trenton wants to hold their arm up in victory for being fiscally responsible in spending public monies they have to do the hard work and takeover the management role in the collective bargaining process!