So the unions acted. In December 2010, Big Labor demanded that the lame-duck Democrat-controlled state Assembly and Senate approve multi-year state union contracts that would extend union benefits into future years. The Assembly passed the measure, but it fell short by just one vote in the Senate.2 So the unions would be forced to negotiate with the new governor over the terms of their contracts.
Once in office, Walker started out making moderate requests for government workers to contribute to their pensions and increase their contributions to their health-care plans.3 The New York Post reported, “Walker warned that he expects some compromise from unions—and if they weren’t cooperative, he’ll look at all options, including changing state unionization laws.”4 The state head of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) took offense at Walker’s approach, saying “It’s like the plantation owner talking to slaves,” and the unions rejected his demands.5 And so, the fight began.
Preparing for Battle
With no compromise forthcoming from the unions, Walker went to battle to save the finances of his state. His first target was Wisconsin’s law permitting collective bargaining over government employees. This law had stripped government workers of their freedom to negotiate with employers on their own behalf for over fifty years. And because Wisconsin was a forced-dues state with dues checkoff, union dues were automatically deducted from government employee paychecks as a condition of their employment.
Walker framed his challenge to union power in moral terms. He explained that collective bargaining laws are just plain immoral. “The unions like to talk about collective bargaining,” Walker stated. “Collective bargaining is not a right, collective bargaining is an expensive entitlement and it’s time we put the power back in the hands of the people.”6 Walker is correct, of course—as we’ve seen, collective bargaining puts money and power in the hands of the Shadowbosses, and it takes away a fundamental right from workers: the right to bargain over their own labor. And of course, forced-dues provisions are even worse.
On February 11, 2011, Walker laid his cards on the table. His budget reform package abolished forced dues for teachers and many other public employees, and also prevented unions from bargaining over these employees’ pensions, benefits, and work rules. Union bosses could still bargain over government employee wages, but “raises could not exceed the increase in the Consumer Price Index unless approved by a referendum”7—which effectively meant not much bargaining over wages, either. And also harmful to union power, Wisconsin was going to get out of the dues checkoff business—so no more collecting dues for the union.
A final reform was that government employee unions would have to be recertified by the workers that they represent every year. So workers would now be able to throw off the mantle of the union if enough of them voted against recertification. This proposal scared the unions to death, because for the first time in generations their stranglehold over Wisconsin government employees was actually at risk.
And this meant war.
Walker retained collective bargaining for police and firefighters. Why? Because, after looking at the long, dirty history of union violence, Walker believed that police and fire union chiefs would have fought him by launching illegal strikes.
Walker retained collective bargaining for police and firefighters. Why? Because, after looking at the long, dirty history of union violence, Walker believed that police and fire union chiefs would have fought him by launching illegal strikes. He didn’t want burning houses or looting in the streets.8
Instead, he got the next best thing.
Battle of the Death Star
With union dues income under serious threat, the Empire took action. The government employee unions targeted the rebel base: Madison, the capital of Wisconsin.
Threats of violence immediately took center stage. One government union militant, a thirty-seven-year-old correctional officer, was arrested for disorderly conduct after allegedly making a verbal threat to shoot Walker.9
A Republican Wisconsin state senator received an e-mail stating: “We will hunt you down. We will slit your throats. We will drink your blood. I will have your decapitated head on a pike in the Madison town square. This is your last warning.” Another e-mail sent around the same time to fifteen GOP state senators was nearly as lurid: “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed due to your actions in the last eight weeks.”
A Republican Wisconsin state senator received an e-mail stating: “We will hunt you down. We will slit your throats. We will drink your blood. I will have your decapitated head on a pike in the Madison town square. This is your last warning.”10 Another e-mail sent around the same time to fifteen GOP state senators was nearly as lurid: “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed due to your actions in the last eight weeks… I hope you have a good time in hell.” The author of the second e-mail, a twenty-six-year-old day-care worker and forced-unionism zealot, was later identified and arrested on two felony bomb-scare counts and two misdemeanor counts.11 She pleaded guilty and avoided jail time by enrolling in a first-offenders program.12 Welcome to the world of the government employee unions—even if you threaten someone with death, you’re usually off the hook. Violence is not necessarily illegal, as we explained in chapter 2, if you’re a member of a union and you were doing it for the cause!
Businesses were faced with boycott—and worse—if they did not support the unions. The CEO of a chain of convenience stores located in Wisconsin and Minnesota received a letter from four union officials. The letter told him to support their actions against Walker, and warned, “In the event that you do not respond to this request by that date, we will assume you stand… against the teachers, nurses, police officers, fire fighters, and other dedicated public employees who serve our communities.” The letter was clear: it wasn’t enough to stay out of the fight. The unions wanted everyone to explicitly endorse their side or face boycotts. That particular letter was signed by a police union official and two firefighters union chiefs. Their signatures created at least the implication that businesses might not be protected by the police and fire departments if they failed to support the unions.13
Teachers union bosses, first in Madison and then in Milwaukee and other cities, called teachers out on illegal strikes and staged angry protests at the state capitol and at legislators’ residences. Within a few days, at least fifteen school districts across the state were forced to cancel classes as teachers called in “sick.” These rallies were chock full of evocative signs: “Why Do Republicans Hate People?” “Scott Walker = Adolf Hitler,” “Midwest Mussolini,” and “Walker Terrorizes Families.”14
David A. Keene, the president of the National Rifle Association and a former chairman of the American Conservative Union, summed up the teacher revolt in Wisconsin where he went to college and law school: “Many of my old radical friends are back now in all their glory. Many of those camped out in the state capitol building and carrying signs declaring their support of ‘workers’ rights’ while comparing their state’s newly elected governor to Hosni Mubarak and Adolf Hitler are gray pony-tailed remnants of a culture most of us thought had vanished into the mists of history. But here they are again, defying orders to clear the capitol grounds while swaying to the folk music of Peter, Paul & Mary’s Peter Yarrow, who can only otherwise be seen on PBS folk revivals with other nearly forgotten guitar-strumming veterans of the ’60s protest movement.”15 While Keene’s description of old radicals again in their glory is amusing, the protestors were deadly serious about stopping Walker cold in his tracks.
Supporters Line Up
The pro-Walker rebel forces gained supporters across America. Bill O’Reilly cited a Quinnipiac poll showing that 42 percent of Americans think unionized government employees make too much money, and that 63 percent think these employees should pay more for their benefits and retirement. “The left-wing media in Ameri
ca will not give you the straight story,” O’Reilly said.16 A former advisor to President Bill Clinton, Dick Morris, agreed: “The liberal media has tried to sell the myth that the public is siding with the unions in these battles. This poll shows the opposite. They largely agree with the restrictions the governors are trying to impose.”17 To make it look better for television, however, the unions quickly assembled some “grassroots” supporters, some of which the unions may have paid to protest. “The left wing radicals in Wisconsin from the unions have mobbed the capital with rent-a-mobs,” noted radio host Michael Savage.18
Leading the pro-Walker supporters in person was the late activist-journalist Andrew Breitbart, who spoke before a massive Tea Party rally in Madison along with Sarah Palin. “The Wisconsin Tea Party supporters made it all worthwhile,” Breitbart related. “But there was another group also there to greet us; the shock troops sent by Richard Trumka and President Obama’s Organizing for America. This was my second trip to Madison in the last couple of months and the defeats that the union’s leadership have suffered in that time have plunged these losers into an even more animalistic state of frenzy. It was a mob, whipped up by the divider-in-chief and his cronies who live off of union dues and taxpayer funded handouts.”19
And the unions weren’t backing down. The day after at least fifteen Wisconsin school districts were shut down by wildcat strikes—strikes called without explicit union authorization—union radicals got a thumbs-up from the White House. President Obama actually invited a reporter and camera crew from a Milwaukee TV station to sit down with him for an interview. Obama suggested that the right-to-work and monopoly bargaining rollback provisions in the package were “an assault on unions.” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer aptly summed up the rationale behind Obama’s sudden involvement: “He’s facing re-election next year. And Democrats need unions.”20
Obama’s rhetoric was in line with a shift in the union strategy against Walker. For weeks, government union bosses had publically opposed increased public employee contributions to their pension and health-care plans. But once it became clear to Big Labor that the Assembly and Senate majorities were poised to pass the bill, union spokesmen and their allies changed their tune. Suddenly, union officials were all compromising sweetness and light. They were ready to go along with benefit reforms just so long as they “were allowed to keep all of their collective bargaining rights.”21
The new tack was savvy public relations. Big Labor wanted Wisconsin citizens and residents of other states to believe that public employees’ right to join a union was at stake. That wasn’t the case. They would retain the right to join a union voluntarily. What was really at stake was monopoly bargaining and forced dues, the two pillars needed to prop up the government employee unions.
Furthermore, even as the government employee union bosses proclaimed they were finally ready to come to the table, many local government union chiefs were doing everything they could to frustrate any actual compromise. Unions were trying to push through contract extensions that would exempt them from having to pay more toward their benefits even as they claimed they wanted to negotiate. In some areas, unions tried to push through raises even as they claimed they were willing to negotiate.
Unions Sink Democracy
Despite these disingenuous public relations tactics, the unions couldn’t stop the Senate or Assembly from passing the bill. Or could they? Six days after Walker unveiled his Budget Repair Act, Wisconsin’s fourteen Democrat senators fled to Illinois to deny the Republican majority in their chamber the quorum it needed to pass legislation requiring appropriations.
With the Senate stalled, GOP leaders in the Assembly decided to take up the Budget Repair Act there. On February 25, 2011, the Assembly voted on the bill. As the Assembly was poised to cast its final vote on Walker’s law, one Democrat representative reportedly shouted “You are f——ing dead” at a Republican colleague. A few minutes later, after the Assembly adopted the bill, the Democrats went wild in the chamber. A Democrat representative threw papers and a cup of water at his opponents across the aisle.22
Then after three weeks in hiding, the Democrat Senators returned to the statehouse, and the Senate passed the bill, which Governor Walker signed into law on March 11.
If they couldn’t stop the bill by preventing a quorum or intimidating elected Wisconsin officials, the unions had another plan: go to court to prevent the Act from going into effect. Using the courts is always a favorite union tactic—unions know that the courts can be used to overrule the will of the people and accomplish what our democratic process will not.
It was time for Plan B. If they couldn’t stop the bill by preventing a quorum or intimidating elected Wisconsin officials, the unions had another plan: go to court to prevent the Act from going into effect. Using the courts is always a favorite union tactic—unions know that the courts can be used to overrule the will of the people and accomplish what our democratic process will not. And the plan was initially successful—a Wisconsin circuit court judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing the law from going into effect. Wisconsin’s Justice Department appealed, and the law’s fate would be decided by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
To get the outcome that they were looking for in the Supreme Court, the unions would need to change the composition of the Court in their favor. So, they tried to unseat conservative-leaning state Supreme Court justice David Prosser in an April 2011 election, and replace him with a labor-friendly judge.23 Despite throwing $3 million into the race against him, the unions were unable to defeat Prosser at the polls. And in June 2011, the Supreme Court ruled to reinstate Walker’s reforms.24
Finally, the unions led a recall vote on six GOP state senators in August 2011, needing to recall three senators to give the Senate back to the Democrats. But although the unions poured $30 million into the recall election, only two GOP state senators were recalled by the voters. The unions lost. And, as George Will points out, the unions demonstrated the “limited utility of money when backing a bankrupt agenda: Only two Republicans were recalled—one was in a heavily Democratic district, the other is a married man playing house with a young girlfriend.”25 And the people of Wisconsin sided with the rebellion.
Wisconsin Takeaway
Not surprisingly, Walker’s dramatic action achieved its economic purpose—it put Wisconsin back on a track to fiscal sanity. Even Democrats sort of “got it.” Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett, a bitter foe of the bill, admitted that thanks to the legislation, his city would save “at least $25 million a year—and potentially as much as $36 million in 2012.”26 By the summer of 2011, localities and school districts across the state were reporting that despite the economic recession, they were able to balance their budgets without firings. Layoffs were occurring only in jurisdictions that didn’t take advantage of the bill’s reforms.27 Not only that, 94 percent of business owners in Wisconsin think the state is on the right track, whereas only 10 percent believed that before the reforms were passed.28
School districts in particular are benefiting from Walker’s bill. One important aspect of the bill was that school districts no longer had to abide by union-negotiated “single-salary schedules,” which lock districts into paying teachers by seniority and degrees earned. Instead, the districts are now allowed to give raises to deserving teachers. Reportedly, teacher morale and collegiality have improved, since nobody is forced into a union.
Predictably, too, the Wisconsin unions took an immediate hit to their bank account. The teachers unions in Wisconsin had to lay off 40 percent of their staff.29 As George Will reported, when Colorado did something similar in 2001, union membership in the government employee union declined 70 percent. “In 2005, Indiana stopped collecting dues from unionized public employees; in 2011, there are 90 percent fewer dues-paying members,” Will noted.30
Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal summed up the effect of Walker’s reforms: “Last year’s $3 billion deficit is now a $300 million surplus—and it wa
s accomplished without the new taxes that unions favored.”31 The Journal also reported recently that the Wisconsin state budget office estimates that the typical homeowner’s property tax bill would be some “$700 higher without Mr. Walker’s collective-bargaining overhaul and budget cuts.”32 Hallelujah!
Some of the reforms in the Budget Repair Act were struck down by a federal court judge in March 2012, precisely because these reforms applied to some government employees but not to public safety workers, which Walker had excluded.33 While the rest of the law was upheld, union recertification and the elimination of dues checkoff were struck down. The law had provided for annual recertification of the unions based on a majority vote of all eligible voters (not just people actually voting in the election). The court suggested that this recertification provision and the prohibition against the state collecting dues on behalf of unions directly from employees’ paychecks, or dues checkoff, would have been upheld if it had applied to all government employee unions equally. For fairness’s sake alone, more states need to adopt regular recertification so that workers have a real choice as to whether or not to be represented by a union and aren’t just stuck with a union certified long ago. Likewise, more states should get out of the business of collecting dues on behalf of government employee unions, which are private organizations.
The battle raged on in Wisconsin, with the unions attempting to recall Governor Walker. On June 5, 2012, Walker became the first governor in American history to survive a recall election. Walker’s victory in this key battle may encourage leaders in other states to curb union power and increase prosperity and workers’ freedoms. But the war against the Shadowbosses will be long and hard-fought.
Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind Page 25