Wisconsin Showdown Pits Unions Against Taxpayers
Labor Vs. Taxpayers: Public-sector unions have had it their way for decades. That will change — and not just in one state — if Scott Walker survives Tuesday's recall vote.
Does Wisconsin matter? To hear some recent spin from Barack Obama's campaign, not as much as you would think.
Voters there on Tuesday will be deciding the political fate of Republican Gov. Walker, along with lieutenant governor and four state senators, in the state's first-ever statewide recall election. The combatants have spent an estimated $60 million so far. It looks to us like a mighty big deal, with big implications for national politics.
But Obama's deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, said the recall will have no bearing on the presidential election.
"This is a gubernatorial race with a guy who was recalled and a challenger trying to get him out of office," she sold MSNBC. "It has nothing to do with President Obama at the top of the ticket, and it certainly doesn't have anything to do with Mitt Romney at the top of the Republican ticket."
That's literally true, but misleading. Romney and Obama aren't on Tuesday's ballot, but let's not pretend this vote is just a sideshow. It's the nation's second most significant election this year. If the presidency isn't directly at stake on Tuesday, the future of organized labor is. Likewise for the Democratic Party, which depends on union money and members to win elections.
The election to recall Walker and his GOP allies is about one issue — collective bargaining for public employees. You can tune out everything else on the list of alleged sins that the Republicans have committed. If they had left the public-sector unions alone, none of this would be happening.
They are under attack because last year they passed a law, Act 10, that threatens to send the unions into something like a death spiral. Act 10 bans collective bargaining with public employees (outside of law enforcement and fire-fighting) over anything but wages.
This provision leaves the taxpayers and their elected representatives fully in control of the real budget-busters — pensions and health benefits. Another provision of Act 10 makes the paying of union dues voluntary. Public workers, even if represented by a union, don't have to join.
There's much more in the law, but these two provisions are its muscle. Together they ensure that unions can't deliver much in the way of economic benefits, and they give workers a way to respond accordingly. They present workers with an easy choice: When dues don't buy you anything and they compete with the cable bill, why pay them?
So it's no surprise that the unions now appear to be losing members — and, of course, money. According to the Wall Street Journal, membership in the Wisconsin branch of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees fell from 62,818 last March to 28,745 this February.
Numbers like those look like a fast track to extinction. The labor movement cannot afford to let the Wisconsin law stand and set an example for other states. It now has more public than private-sector employees in its ranks, and it may not survive as a significant political force if it loses the government sector. No wonder Walker, in the movement's eyes, has to go.
By the same token, saving Walker and his allies from recall is essential to the cause of sound governance. They have taken the bold step of reversing a policy that never met the standards of fair play and has led many states and cities to the edge of bankruptcy.
Collective bargaining for public workers is wrong for a simple common-sense reason: It enables unions to bargain, in effect, with themselves. The money and membership they gain from representing workers gives them undue power to influence elections.
Where they are strong, they pick the people on the other side of the table. Public collective bargaining has, among other things, produced union-tamed school boards and the California Legislature.
Wisconsin led the way toward this costly state of affairs when it became the first state, in 1959, to grant collective bargaining rights to municipal workers. It is now showing us the way out. In doing so, it's affirming the wisdom of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a great friend of unions who nevertheless knew, as he once put it, that "the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service."
Should Walker survive, the labor movement can expect plenty of battles in similar states, and the police and fire unions may not be spared next time. It may soon face a choice: Either make itself relevant again in the private sector, where it represents only about 7% of workers, or accept that its moment in history is past.
That may also be the time for the Democratic Party, rather than continuing to lean on organized labor's dwindling strength, to start serving the taxpaying public instead of union bosses. |
