Under a plan proposed in the legislature, Wisconsin state workers would get raises amounting to 5 percent over the next 18 months. For taxpayers, that translates into an additional burden of about $126 million, under calculations prepared by the Office of State Employment Relations.
Wisconsin has a lot of employees. There are all those office workers in all those buildings around the Capitol. There are bureaucratic outposts from one end of the state to the other. There are judges and prosecutors and public defenders. There are professors and support staff at the universities. And on and on and on.