This was probably not the best time for the Milwaukee teachers union to press their demand for free Viagra. As labor activists rallied in Wisconsin to win over public opinion and block Governor Scott Walker’s tough stance against unions, the group announced they had dropped a lawsuit demanding taxpayer help with erectile dysfunction. For some, that quest said volumes about the excessive demands of government employees.
Americans by and large are a fair-minded bunch. While sympathetic to efforts in New York ending the unproductive “last in, first out” firing of teachers, most people were offended by Governor Walker’s intention to reduce the bargaining rights of union workers. The media didn’t help: describing his proposal as “stripping public service employees of their collective bargaining rights” made it sound like he was tying workers to posts and lighting the kindling.
Like many other Republican candidates, Walker ran last year on a platform of fiscal sobriety, and was elected to balance the state’s debt-ridden books. That’s what his budget tries to do. Some provisions in that plan are popular. For instance, a recent poll reports that 81% of the state supports having public workers contribute to their pensions – a key money-saver proposed by Walker.
wrote that “the process of collective
bargaining, as usually understood,
cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
However, Walker’s proposals that limit bargaining, that make union membership voluntary and that preclude the state from directly collecting union dues from worker paychecks are viewed as extreme and alarm labor leaders. As private sector unions have withered, public employee organizations have blossomed. They are not used to confrontation. As in other states, Wisconsin’s government worker unions have helped elect officials supportive of their generous compensation, enthusiastic about their growing ranks and subservient to their self-protecting work rules. It is truly an unholy alliance, and the principle reason that President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to labor leader Luther Steward in 1937 that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
Walker has been accused of attempting to curb the political clout of organized labor. Who can blame him? The nostalgic idea that teachers evoke cozy recollections of home-room cupcakes and story time is over. The reality is that the unions representing teachers are political goliaths and decidedly opposed to Republicans. (Teachers are at the heart of the Wisconsin dispute, since Walker is not attempting to eliminate the bargaining position of police and firefighters.)
who have fled the state to prevent Walker’s budget
from passing have received money from labor unions.
The Wisconsin Education Association Council’s PAC spent just under $1.6 million in direct support of Democrats running for office in the state last year. Nationally, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers were the fourth and fifth largest overall contributors to the 2008 campaign – and almost all the money went to Democrats. That doesn’t even begin to count the “get-out-the-vote” work done by unions for their favored candidates. Should unions be able to elect a candidate and then negotiate with them for salary and benefits? Most would agree that’s an ethical violation based on conflict of interest.
The impact of their largess is obvious. Thirteen of the fourteen Democrat (but not so democratic) state senators who have fled the state to prevent Walker’s budget from passing have received money from labor unions; in some cases unions have contributed 73 percent to the lawmaker’s campaigns.
While their political and financial clout remains huge, teachers unions across the country are under fire – not only for their generous salaries and benefits, but also because the public is increasingly critical of our schools. Report after report shows American kids lagging behind their foreign peers, even as taxpayers in the U.S. pay top dollar towards their education. After decades of complaints that our declining schools were suffering from lack of money, more recent appraisals attribute the shortfall to a host of problems, including the strangling work rules and tenure provisions incorporated into union agreements, along with money spent on bilingual and special education programs.
Governor Walker has proposed expanding the choices that parents have, by raising the number of charter schools in the state and slicing the red tape restricting such schools. In the budget, he points out that between 1994 and 2009, “Wisconsin’s ranking on fourth-grade reading has dropped from 3rd (out of 39 states reporting) to 30th (out of 50.)” He also wants to loosen mandates that require cookie-cutter solutions to problems and bloat budgets, such as providing “detailed indoor environmental quality plans.”
Wisconsin is not unique in its travails. In spite of long-term job losses resulting from the outsourcing of local manufacturing overseas, state and local spending grew at twice the rate of inflation between 1992 and 2008. The increased outlays were financed by rising property taxes, leading to Wisconsin’s unenviable position as 9th among states in property taxes as a portion of personal income. Medicaid has grown at 11% per year in the past five years and enrollment has jumped 7% annually. Like many states, Wisconsin’s budget woes in the recent past were papered over by federal stimulus money, which is nearly depleted.
All over the country governors are struggling to confront the spiraling costs of government worker pay and benefits packages. For the first time in memory, the public is debating what is fair and what is not. Governor Walker, who deserves much respect for pushing the conversation forward, needs to find common ground and reach a compromise. If he refuses to bend, he plays into the Democrats’ favorite narrative about obdurate Republicans, and risks alienating public opinion at a critical juncture. Other leaders are watching the Milwaukee confrontation; they may back off if Walker suffers irreparable damage. He would do well to take the concessions offered by unions on pay and benefits, push the structural changes to school choice and to work rules, but abandon his charge against bargaining rights. Better to win the war than this particular battle.
Related Links:
Collective Bargaining Wrong Budget Target (Columbia Daily Tribune)
Michigan Workers Jam Capitol to Protest Union Plan (Reuters)
