Fearing voters, WisGOPs now want to revive bailout of Kimberly-Clark

Well this is an interesting set of dominoes in the Fox Valley. Maybe Kimberly-Clark won’t be shutting their Cold Spring facility near Appleton and laying off over 600 workers after all. This is after the corporation reached an agreement with the United Steelworkers that are employed at the plant last night.

“It’s a new collective bargaining agreement that would provide Kimberly-Clark with concessions that would allow the facility to remain open,” said Dave Breckheimer, president of USW local 2-482.

“But nothing happens unless the state comes through with the incentive package,” Breckheimer said. “That’s the next step towards this becoming a reality. Those tax incentives have to be available.” ….

Breckheimer wouldn’t say which concessions employees made in the new Cold Spring collective bargaining agreement negotiated over months with the company and approved Monday night.

But he did confirm that concessions were not as severe as previously stated.

In a prior story, Cold Spring employee Karmen Jones said K-C “was asking workers to make concessions that would cut their average labor costs by more than $20,000 per person.”

How surprising that workers get less so they might keep working at a multinational who said the main reason behind the planned layoffs because the Trump/GOP Tax Scam gave them enough extra cash so they could afford to "restructure" their company. Ah, 21st Century “capitalism”.


And Kimberly-Clark might be getting another tax break at the state level, as that tentative collective bargaining agreement revives the possibility of a Kimberly-Clark bailout from Wisconsin taxpayers. You may remember this coming up 6 months ago, when K-C initially announced its plans to shut down the plant.

The bailout plan would have given Kimberly-Clark writeoffs that were similar to the package given to Foxconn last year, including 17% cas0h back on all salaries and 15% back on any new equipment or facility renovations.

The State Assembly passed the Kimberly-Clark bailout in February (4 GOPs voted no, 1 Dem voted yes), But it didn’t have enough support to go to the State Senate when that upper chamber allegedly adjourned for the 2017-19 session in March.

Now Senate President Roger Roth (a Republican from the Fox Valley who is one of the most vulnerable GOPs in November) wants to get GOP Leader Scott Fitzgerald to call the senators back into Madison in order to pass the Kimberly-Clark bailout.

Roth said Tuesday that passing it through the Senate won't be easy -- adding that it may not be able to pass with support from GOP senators only.

"We'll need some Democrats to come to the table," Roth said.

Fitzgerald's office could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday on whether he would reconvene the Senate.

Governor Walker also gave a statement of support of the K-C bailout and of “working with Senate leaders and the company”. Which is ironic since the main reason Walker gave for trying to block special elections to fill vacant seats in the Legislature was as follows.

Under state law, a special election for a vacant seat in the legislature cannot be called at this time until after 4/3. The Legislature will be done for the year by then and nomination papers for the fall elections come out 4/15.

— Governor Walker (@GovWalker) February 27, 2018

Bit now Scotty and Senator Roth are asking Senate Dems, including newly-elected Caleb Frostman, to be part of a group that could jam through “Foxconn, Part 2” for Kimberly-Clark. In the process, the GOPs want to throw out even more money when we already are staring at a $1 billion structural deficit for the next budget.

It’s amazing to see how the prospect of job losses and a Blue Wave at the ballot box in 3 ½ months has turned “free-market” Republicans into believers of corporate welfare and the use of tax dollars to keep and add jobs, isn’t it? It’s almost like they aren’t tough on spending at all, but merely redirect where the tax dollars go - to their donors and to corporations in the hope that they might trickle down a few jobs.

And given how Gov Dropout is making ads that claim he’s “Mr. Education” these days, it’s almost like GOPs know that their prior austerity plans and privatization schemes have failed when it comes to improving the state’s economy, and that they need good ol’ fashioned government spending to stabilize things and make people's situations better before the November elections.

What a bunch of frauds.