Milwaukee Biz Blog

Our budget issues exist because the people that WORK for a living are almost outnumbered by the people that VOTE for a living.

Furthermore, some of the people that work for a living have not realized the consequence of this current state. We need to ALL realize this before this number gets past 50/50.  Whether you are a Republican or Democrat this does not matter as it is important for all that work for a living that the entitled do not control the vote of where our money goes and how much of it is needed. This is NOT about the people but rather the system. We as working voters need to work the system to our advantage.

If you work for a living, and do not get a check from the government, then you are paying taxes to cover the cost of those that work for the government, as well as those getting welfare or other assistance. If you are a government worker it means that only part of your wage is returned to the government (via taxes) but the rest of your wage is still a cost to the taxpayers. Government workers, and those getting assistance, vote for what gets them the best deal, not what is best for the country/state/county/city.

Case in point, look at what happened in Madison when Governor Walker balanced the budget. Government workers trashed the State Capitol (showing little respect for items we bought as tax payers) because their “perceived” rights were being reduced. Where were they when private workers were getting laid off, taking wage and benefit cuts or had their co-pays increased? Where were they during the Mercury Marine showdown? Where were the lawyers when these same people voted in elected official after elected official, who later gave them these rights fully knowing they would be out of office when the bills came due? Where was the outcry for conflict of interest? How is someone able to elect the person that will negotiate their contract?

We need to act now as free, hard working people, Democrat or Republican, rich or poor, to elect officials that will NOT push for entitlement and big government. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have.  The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.”

We need to look at these elections and decide, is the person that I am voting for helping me to help myself, or is he/she trying to control me. Entitlement has to stop! It started as a safety net, and has become a lifestyle. Big government has to stop! We can’t afford to do everything, for everybody, forever. We need to get back to working hard and helping others without the cost of big government. When government runs programs they cost more and we get less. Churches and foundations are way more cost effective in putting your donations to good use and helping people because they hold themselves accountable and are doing things for the right reasons. 

Remember, the people that you elected to government posts have not taken pay cuts and they have not reduced their benefits. They have for the most part taken pay increases, bettered their golden parachutes and increased the pay and benefits of their staff while the working people of this country took cuts in all areas. The only elected person I know of that took a pay cut over the past several years was Governor Scott Walker while he was Milwaukee County Executive.

We need the balance of power to stay on the side of the hard working people of this country/state/county/city before it is too late. This time is coming fast and we need to act now. DO NOT allow old prejudices to get in the way of your vote. Vote for what is right! Vote to end entitlement and get hard work rewarded again.

Jaime J. Maliszewski is the president of Milwaukee-based Reliable Plating Works Inc.

I consider myself middle class even though I do not make as much, nor do I have a paid for pension, like most of the people that are protesting in Madison.

I do not feel condemned if Governor Walker’s Budget Bill is passed. What I feel is condemned if it is not. 

I will become a slave to the government unions!! If they have their way all private sector employees will be forced to work and pay taxes so that they can keep their cushy jobs with total protection from being fired and no accountability or expectations. Their ads say that the middle class will be crushed by this bill, however, it affects less then 7 percent of the state and most, if not all are upper middle class making wages and benefits in excess of $80,000.

The runaways make you feel like they are sacrificing for the poor middle class that is going to loose everything, and that the kids will suffer in schools because funding is being cut. Then they turn around and say that the Republicans should change the way they are voting or face loosing their jobs. Maybe, just maybe, these runaways are just worried about their own jobs because they were put into office by the same people that they are trying to keep happy. They, being the unions that pump more money into the Democratic Party than any other source.  

The middle class union workers are more in danger of loosing everything if the state goes bankrupt than with this deal. This deal will assure them their jobs and pensions now and in the future. They should be thanking Governor Walker. 

As for the kids, paying higher wages and pensions will not help educate them any better. Private school teachers make less and their kids earn more scholarships, have better test scores and go onto college many more times over than public school kids. Just as State Senator, Chris Larson, who has obviously forgotten about his private school upbringing (grade school and high school).  

So honestly (I know, asking a runaway to be honest) runaways, it is not about the middle class (me included), it is not about the rights of your people (federal employees do not have this collective bargaining “right”), it is not about the kids (private school teachers make less and achieve much better results), it is about you (the Democratic State Senator) saving your jobs by helping the people that “bought” you into office.

Jaime Maliszewski is president of RPW Inc. in Milwaukee.

John F. Kennedy had it right almost 50 years ago when he told Americans, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!"

We have forgotten this rallying cry and have gotten lazy; causing this current mess we are now so desperate to fix. We became dependent on our government for everything and now we all want to be "bailed out."

This won’t work! It will only postpone the inevitable, unless we ALL decide to roll up our sleeves and work our way out of it.

We need to bring work and jobs back into this country so that we have people/consumers with money that can buy our products. Sending all of our manufacturing jobs to foreign countries took our best-paying jobs with them, leaving too few consumers behind with jobs to buy our goods.

I know it is easy to blame big business for sending these jobs to foreign countries, but the American buying public is just as much to blame. We buy cheap, without any care for where or how an item is made.

How can you blame big business for trying to make cheaper products when that is what we are demanding? Granted, big business took the easy way out and sent the work over rather then finding better/leaner ways to operate, but then again, many of the unions fought this progress, cutting their own throats.

Big business had it half right in the 1980s when they marketed "Buy American." It should have included "Build American," because in the 1990s they started buying many of their manufactured goods form foreign counties or even opened American companies overseas or in Mexico.

Take Wal-Mart, for example. When Sam Walton started the company, he proudly marketed "Buy American." Now, you would be hard-pressed to find American-made products in his stores.

Better example, look what buying foreign goods has gotten us. Poisoned pet food and toothpaste, as well as toys with lead paint with little or no safety standards. Child labor abuse has skyrocketed worldwide and world pollution levels have increased due to the non-regulation or non-enforcement of pollution laws in the countries that build these products. Worker safety and care are also non-existent in many of these countries, as well.

Sending jobs to foreign countries to lower our costs does not and did not work. It did not work in our free market system because it eliminated the buying power (jobs) of the people who make up our market, our consumers.

It IS that simple.

All businesses outsource work, either to lower costs because someone else has a better way of making the product or because they need to increase their capacity. My brothers and I do this in our three companies (but only with American companies). However, now that times are tough and sales are down, we have brought many of these jobs back into our shops to better utilize our people and assets.

We are working harder, smarter and for less money just to survive these tough times. We know we need to take care of our own first. We also buy all of our equipment from American companies, even all of our company and personal cars are American-made.  We, as a country, need to pull the outsourced work back into this country. We don't need cash bail outs, we need work.

Building roads and schools is good, but stimulus payments back to the American people are only a Band Aid. We need jobs, and to get jobs, we need to bring the work back.

Create incentives to buy American. Eliminate all the pet projects of our congressmen and women from the stimulus bill and work on helping to bring work back into this country.  Hard work built this country, and hard work will save it!

As Americans we need to take back our country and have pride and loyalty in being the best country in the world.  Stop blaming the other side and start doing what you can for your country. We don't need to wait for the stimulus. We can start today by “Buying American - Building American - Being American!" This goes for every American citizen, whether you are buying for your company or your family!

Jaime Maliszewski is president of RPW Inc., Elite Finishing LLC and Brilliance LLC in Milwaukee.

The other night on the news, I listened to our congressmen publicly blast the senior management of the Big Three automakers, and I thought, "That's right, give it to them!"

As an owner of small businesses, I know the heartache of keeping a business afloat during tough times. My brothers and I have gone without pay, eliminated our own benefits and have had many sleepless nights worrying about how we were going to pay suppliers and employees.

We knew we were not going to get bailed out. We only have 130 employees and no one cared if we went bankrupt.

Then I started to think, "Wait a minute, the people blasting these executives who are trying to get through the recession caused by this Congress are currently trillions of dollars in debt themselves and have been for years and years."

They have been so irresponsible for so long that this has become the norm! If this Congress had come before themselves asking to be bailed out, not only would they have been publicly humiliated, they would have been put in jail.

They make the Enron executives look like model businessmen.

Now, don't get me wrong. The Big Three deserved what they got and should be held accountable for their actions. Heck, the best thing may still be that they file bankruptcy.

But this is still a case of our government being extremely hypocritical and pompous. They are asking that senior management of these companies work for a dollar a year until profitable. Has any congressman ever done this?

They have asked that they give up their perks and extravagant benefits, all the while flaunting theirs.
It is time that our government officials stand up and be accountable to the people they work for, the American public! I put this challenge to our Wisconsin senators and representatives to be the first to forgo their pay and benefits, until the country is no longer at deficit spending.

I think it is high time we, the American public, stand up and hold our government accountable! Our votes are our power, and we need to seriously consider who we want handling our future.

Jaime Maliszewski is vice president of the Airport Gateway Business Association (AGBA) and is the president of Reliable Plating Works Inc. and GM Elite Finishing LLC, as well as a founding member of Brilliance LLC.

I am the vice president of the Airport Gateway Business Association (AGBA), which manages the Airport Gateway Business Improvement District #40 (AGBID).  The AGBID has over 450 commercial property owners, and there are over 15,000 employees in the AGBA area.

Also, my two brothers and I own three businesses on Milwaukee's south side, one of which has been owned by our family for over 78 years. This blog is on behalf of those organizations and our family's companies.

On Dec. 11, Milwaukee's Common Council passed a resolution to maintain the status quo of Interstate 94 having six traffic lanes from the Illinois border through the Mitchell interchange and to oppose the expansion to eight lanes as recommended by Wisconsin's Department of Transportation.

We strongly disagree with the council's resolution and view it as extremely short-sighted with a provincial view vs. the 40-year impact of the full I-94 reconstruction project. 

The Milwaukee 7 effort is focused on growing southeastern Wisconsin as an economic entity that increasingly meshes with greater Chicago. General Mitchell International Airport is forecasting the need for another runway and two terminal wings by 2021 to support increasing customer traffic.

Additional growth is already occurring along the I-94 corridor to Illinois, and more is forecast. The AGBA, which includes many transportation-related and affected businesses, is working to promote the south side of Milwaukee County area as the Gateway to Milwaukee.

For all of this growth to efficiently occur, car and truck traffic will need to flow well along I-94 and its ramps. Keeping I-94 as it has been for the last 40 years will increasingly obstruct this growth over the next 40 years.

At the same time, however, we do support the council's comments about the state and southeastern Wisconsin working together to develop a comprehensive plan regarding transportation in the area, to include the addition of the KRM (Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee) rail line. We believe that the City of Milwaukee can and should play a leading role in facilitating the development of such a plan.

However, formally voting against expanding I-94 to eight lanes appears more of an obstruction approach vs. a leadership approach.

Jaime Maliszewski is vice president of the Airport Gateway Business Association (AGBA) and is the president of Reliable Plating Works Inc. and GM Elite Finishing LLC, as well as a founding member of Brilliance LLC.

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation is proposing to close the Layton Avenue on/off ramps of Interstate 94.

The Airport Gateway Business Association (AGBA) is working with areas businesses to save the ramps and the businesses! This is a huge issue to businesses and residents on the south side of Milwaukee.

The companies of the AGBA rely heavily on I-94's on ramps and off ramps, located west of 13th Street on Layton Avenue in Milwaukee. 

Our vehicles use those ramps 1,500 to 2,000 times per day. Our customers' and suppliers' trucks use them 2,000 to 3,000 times per day. Without them we would be forced to go much farther out of our way, increasing our fuel costs and labor cost (around $3 million per year). It would also affect our customers, who would also see cost increases (potentially causing them to go elsewhere), and our suppliers, who would seek to recover their increased costs as well.

This $3 million increase in costs would decrease profits, which would then decrease our employees' profit sharing. 

We also know that we are not the only businesses that will be hurt by this proposed change. There are more than 450 businesses in this area which use these ramps daily and will be negatively affected. There are more restaurants (fast-food and sit-down) within a one-mile radius of the Layton Avenue ramps than from any other ramp, north or south 10 miles of I-94 and Layton Avenue.

The closing of this ramp would greatly impact the sales dollars generated by these restaurants. Additionally, area residents and employees will also be rerouted and faced with increased fuel costs and time away from family due to longer commute times. Our employees work and many of our businesses thrive here partly due to the ease of access.  These businesses have invested millions of dollars counting on the continued traffic flow.

We urge the DOT to reconsider the possibility of closing the Layton Avenue ramps. This area has been abused long enough by lack of city and state backing, and this would be one more instance where we are forgotten and left to fend for ourselves.

This will greatly reduce the effectiveness of the recent Business Improvement District (BID) that AGBA worked so hard to form this year. Taking these ramps away will dramatically affect everything we have worked for as a business association during the past two years and will severely hurt the revitalization of the south side.

In his recent "State of the City" speech, Mayor Tom Barrett did not issue any further aid for this area, nor did he mention the south side. We know that it is up to us to keep this development going!

Please help by keeping the Layton Avenue ramps open! We are more than willing to speak to anyone about this in detail. 

Jaime Maliszewski is the vice president of the Airport Gateway Business Association (AGBA) and is president of Reliable Plating Works and its subsidiary, Elite Finishing, of Milwaukee. He can be reached at (414) 397-2171 or by e-mail jaimem@rpwinc.net. Additional information is available at www.dot.wisconsin.gov/projects/d2/i94/index.htm.