Unintimidated

by Scott Walker

  I didn’t tell my staff, but it was then that I started thinking: What if we cut aid to schools and local governments, but gave them the freedom to replace the lost aid through efficiencies that collective bargaining had prevented? What if we increased health care and pension contributions for public workers, but allowed them to make up for part of the lost money by giving them a choice as to whether to pay their union dues? What if we could find a way to balance the budget—while protecting taxpayers, protecting the poor, protecting schools, protecting local governments, protecting teachers and public workers—by taking the money from the unions instead?

  What if we got rid of collective bargaining?

  CHAPTER 4

  Super-Size It

  On November 19, a few weeks after that eye-popping budget briefing, I traveled to San Diego for the annual meeting of the Republican Governors Association. At that meeting, I spent a lot of time with Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. Our discussions proved to be a critical turning point in my thinking about how to address the budget crisis in Madison.

  Since taking office in 2005, Mitch had been a whirlwind of reform. He made tough decisions to close an $800 million deficit, pushed through controversial plans to adopt daylight saving time, and privatized Indiana’s toll roads. I was particularly interested in learning more about one of his first acts as governor, when he eliminated collective bargaining for state employees. I wanted to hear everything he had learned from his experience with collective bargaining in Indiana—how he did it, how his opponents responded, and what the results had been.

  Mitch told me his reforms had been a huge success. Eliminating collective bargaining saved taxpayers buckets of money, he said, but those savings were only the secondary benefit. The primary benefit was the flexibility to make state government perform better.

  None of the hundreds of operational reforms he enacted during his two terms in office—from consolidating state agencies to privatizing toll roads—would have been possible if he had been required to put each decision through excruciating negotiations and compromises with the unions. Getting rid of collective bargaining freed him to act—to downsize government offices, shift workers from one job to another, and to make dysfunctional agencies functional again.

  By the time he faced reelection, Mitch said, he had dozens of examples of agencies that were working better. The Department of Motor Vehicles, which most everyone hated when he took office, was soon rated the best in the United States and Canada. The same was true of other government agencies. Collective bargaining reform had not only helped him balance Indiana’s state budget, it had also freed him to deliver services more efficiently to the taxpayers. Indiana voters recognized it and overwhelmingly elected him to a second term. During the campaign, his opponents were able to say a lot of things about him, but nobody was able to say, “The state government’s a mess.”

  Mitch told me that he really hesitated over his decision on collective bargaining—and he was not one to dally. He said he had a mental view of mass protests erupting, and major opposition from the public-worker unions—the kinds of things that neither of us at that moment could have imagined would soon grip Wisconsin.

  When he finally issued his executive order, he said he was surprised that it had caused so little a stir. It ended up being one of the least controversial decisions he had made as governor. Putting Indiana on daylight savings time had sparked a far greater public uproar. I’d have to evaluate for myself what the reaction in Wisconsin would be if I went ahead, he told me.

  I knew Mitch’s situation was different from ours in several respects. For one thing, his reforms applied only to state workers. I knew I was not going to be able to save enough money if I only eliminated collective bargaining for state employees. We were going to have to cut over a billion dollars in aid to schools and local governments. If they were going to make up for the lost assistance from the state, we would have to take what Mitch did and super-size it. We would have to free not just the state, but also counties, municipalities, and school districts from collective bargaining rules as well.

  Mitch was also blessed by the fact that Governor Evan Bayh had instituted collective bargaining in 1989 by executive order. That meant he could eliminate it simply by issuing a new executive order. The deed was done with one swift stroke, before his opponents had time to organize protests, order signs, or rent buses and trailers to encircle his state capitol. Later, when the unions did just that to the state capitol in Madison, I joked that if I could have opened a desk drawer and found an executive order to reverse as Mitch had, I would have done it in a heartbeat.

  I knew that if I decided to move forward, I would have to pass legislation. And based on my experience with the unions in Milwaukee County, I knew I would probably face a bigger push back than Mitch had faced (though I never imagined how much bigger).

  Mitch gave me some advice: First, he said, whatever you decide to do, go big, go bold, and strike fast. If you have hard things to do, he said, do them as soon as you think they’re right—because the sooner you act, the more time your reforms will have to work. You want as much time as possible for good results to show themselves, and for people to put an event in perspective. If I thought I knew what the right thing to do was, he said, I should do it quickly.

  Second, he told me to remember that political capital is not something you spend, it’s something you invest—and properly invested, it brings a return. When you make bold reforms and people see that they worked, they will give your next big idea a little more credence.

  Third, he said, always have that next big idea ready. Never stop reforming. Some of your proposals will stall out, and there will always be folks who will not agree with you on everything you do. But people will come to see you as an innovator—someone with good ideas who is constantly trying to make things better. Moreover, if you’re constantly innovating, your opponents will constantly be responding. When people disagree or throw rocks, better that they are responding to your agenda rather than setting one for you.

  That advice in particular resonated with me. I was in the Wisconsin legislature in the 1990s when Tommy Thompson was governor. Tommy was constantly putting forward the next reform—welfare reform, tax reform, education reform. He was always several steps ahead of the opposition, and they could never catch up. As soon as they organized to try to stop one of his reforms, he’d have passed it and would be on to the next big thing.

  The more I spoke with Mitch over the course of the weekend, the more I learned about how his reforms had worked, and the more confident I became that similar reforms could succeed in Wisconsin.

  Leaving that meeting in San Diego, I was ready to get rid of collective bargaining.

  Then something happened that confirmed the need for bold action.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Bring It On”

  As Milwaukee County executive, I had refused to submit a wish list to Governor Doyle for items in the federal “stimulus” package. Like other politicians, Doyle had lined up at the federal trough begging for billions in “free” money to cover budget deficits and to fuel new spending. He and others were outraged that I didn’t join them—and that I didn’t relent even after the president signed the stimulus bill into law.

  My explanation was simple. The “free” money from Washington wasn’t free. The stimulus was a classic bait and switch. Once the highways were built and social service caseloads had increased, the stimulus funds would disappear and Wisconsin taxpayers would be left with the bill to maintain the new roads and services. Moreover, the stimulus was also a bait and switch on employment. While stimulus spending might create a few construction jobs in the short term, when the federal money disappeared, so would the jobs.

  Not only had I refused to submit a stimulus wish list, I had also campaigned for governor on a promise to cancel a stimulus-funded program to build an expensive high-speed rail line between Madison and Milwaukee. While the
Obama administration was promising $810 million in federal funds for the project, I knew that the state would be on the hook for shortfalls, as well as the annual operating subsidies once the line was complete. We estimated that the project was going to cost Wisconsin taxpayers $110 million. We were broke and just could not afford it.

  After my election, Governor Doyle canceled the project. “I could play brinksmanship with this issue and I could just plow forward and put people out at job sites,” Doyle said. “We could spend or obligate hundreds of millions of dollars between now and the time I leave office. And while obviously part of me says, ‘Just do that,’ I really have to actually consider what the practical consequences of this are. . . . I don’t think that’s in anybody’s best interest.”1

  It was a major victory. We had saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $100 million before even taking office.

  Doyle and the public union bosses did decide to play brinksmanship on another matter, however—one that nearly scuttled our chances for budget reform.

  In December, the outgoing Democratic majorities in the state legislature called a lame-duck session and tried to pass a series of union contracts negotiated with the Doyle administration—contracts that, if approved, would have tied my hands in dealing with the state budget shortfall when I took office.

  I had made clear during the campaign that I would be asking state workers to pay more for their health care and pensions. I ran a television ad on it.2 It was a centerpiece of my campaign. And with the fiscal crisis we inherited much worse than we had expected, we could not wait until the following fiscal year to make those changes I had promised.

  But now, in the final days of Democratic rule, the unions were trying a last-minute end run—attempting to lock the contracts in and force us to put off our promised reforms. The unions were transparent in their objectives. AFSCME president Robert McLinn and executive director Marty Beil had written a letter to their union members right after my election in November warning that it was “important that we have a contract in place before the incoming Walker administration takes over.”3

  Now they were trying to jam that contract through the legislature just before Democrats ceded control. It was a raw power play, and it demonstrated in no uncertain terms that the unions were not interested in working with me.

  On December 7, I addressed the issue at a Milwaukee Press Club luncheon. I began by making clear my respect for public workers. “You are not going to hear me degrade state and local employees in the public sector,” I said. “There are good people who work in government, and they are public servants. But we can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and the taxpayers who foot the bill are the have-nots. Public employees can’t be the untouchables.”

  The unions were having none of it. “State workers and other public workers aren’t about to sacrifice their benefits for some political future of a tyrant,” AFSCME leader Marty Beil declared. “This is all about Scott Walker kind of bringing back, instead of public service, it is public servitude. He’s the master of the plantation and we’re supposed to be his slaves; that’s his philosophy here. So I think he’d be real happy if we were paid minimum wage and had no pension at all.”4

  I would face far worse from Beil and his cohorts in the months ahead, but let the record show: Union leaders like Beil were declaring me a “tyrant” and “plantation master” long before we introduced Act 10.

  In my comments, I cautioned that if the unions refused to cooperate, I would have no choice but to use every tool at my disposal on taking office to rein them in. “The bottom line is we are going to look at every legal means we have to try and put that balance more on the side of taxpayers,” I said, adding that we would consider “anything from [decertification] all the way through modifications of the current law in place. The bottom line is we want to have a better ability to control what we do when it comes to wages and benefits.”5

  To this, Beil responded: “Bring it on.”6

  We almost didn’t have a chance to do so. The unions’ contract ploy nearly succeeded. In the assembly, Democrats called an extraordinary session where they approved the contracts by a razor-thin 47-46 margin. They had been one vote short of victory. To ram the contracts through, they needed the vote of Representative Jeff Wood, who was serving time for his fourth operating while intoxicated offense.7 According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wood cast the deciding vote after he “was released from jail Wednesday so he could attend the legislative session.”8

  In other words, an assembly that had just been fired by the people of Wisconsin approved contracts negotiated by a lame-duck governor relying on a state representative who was let out of jail to cast the deciding vote. It was a remarkable display of political bravado.

  It looked to everyone like the contracts were headed for approval in the senate. But then something remarkable happened. Two Democratic senators—Russ Decker and Jeff Plale—bucked their party and voted no. Their defections deadlocked the senate in a 16-16 tie—killing the contracts. It was a remarkable display of political courage.

  Plale was a centrist Democrat who believed in bipartisan cooperation, and the end run the unions were trying to pull offended him. He had lost his seat to a liberal primary challenger, and had made clear from the start that he would be voting against the contracts. His “no” vote had been expected by both sides.

  But Decker’s vote took everyone by surprise. He was not just another Democratic senator—he was the Democrats’ majority leader. It would be like Harry Reid casting the lone, deciding vote against his own party in the U.S. Senate—virtually unthinkable. Moreover, Decker had voted in favor of the contracts that morning during a meeting of the legislature’s employee relations committee.

  Then, just before the vote on the first contract, Decker rose and explained to his startled colleagues that he would be voting no with the Republican minority. Decker was a straightforward kind of speaker who usually spoke off the cuff. But on this occasion, when he rose to address the members of the senate, he pulled out prepared remarks. He had obviously given great thought to what he was about to say.

  “[E]lections have consequences,” Decker declared. “While I would obviously like to have seen a different outcome in the election, both for myself and my Democratic colleagues, the people of Wisconsin have spoken and they have said they want someone else to make these decisions for them.”9

  He pointed out that in 2002, when Republican governor Scott McCallum lost his election, he held over contracts for a new governor and legislature to act upon instead of trying to ram them through in a lame-duck session. Now, Decker said, Democrats should extend the same courtesy to me and the incoming Republican majority.

  “Now that the election has been held and the voters have spoken, I do not feel comfortable casting a vote in favor of these contracts,” Decker said.

  Decker’s Democratic colleagues were furious, and they exacted swift vengeance. In a closed-door meeting after the first deadlocked vote, they stripped him of his majority leader post. Decker had served in the senate for twenty years. He was a union bricklayer. But despite all the good he had done for his party and the union cause in the past, when he crossed the union bosses on a point of principle, they kicked him to the curb.

  The move was largely symbolic. Decker had lost his seat to a Republican in November and was about to retire anyway. And it made no difference to the final outcome. When Democrats called another vote under their new majority leader, Senator Dave Hansen, the result was the same. Each of the contract votes was deadlocked 16-16.

  The union scheme had been upended. The contracts were dead.

  Democratic senator Bob Jauch called Decker’s vote “the most disgusting behavior by any public official I have seen in twenty-eight years.”10 He compared Decker to a “three-year-old who is pouting”11 and said he had “left a legacy of being a loser.”12

  In his typi
cally understated manner, AFSCME chief Marty Beil declared Decker “a whore,”13 adding, “He’ll never ever hold a seat as a Democrat” again.14

  The unions had been just one vote away from tying our hands before we even took office. Had they succeeded in pushing through the contracts and delaying implementation of our reforms for another year, they would not have had the immediate, positive impact they did—and I might never have survived a recall election. Public opinion in Wisconsin began to turn decisively in our favor only after it became clear that our reforms had worked—when voters saw that we had not decimated public education but rather had allowed local officials and school districts to balance their budgets, lower property taxes, save money, and add teachers to the classrooms. If our reforms had been put off, those improvements might never have happened in time for the voters to judge us on the merits during the recall election in 2012.

  So Decker’s courageous vote not only upended the public-worker unions’ attempted legislative coup, it probably saved my job.

  The entire episode was sad. The Democrats had relied on a man who had to be released from jail to cast the deciding vote in the assembly, only to see their own majority leader cast the deciding vote against them in the senate. Jeff Fitzgerald, the incoming Republican speaker of the state assembly, called it “the final act of a Greek tragedy.”15 He was right.

  The spectacle was also revealing. It made clear that the Democrats and union bosses were not interested in cooperation or compromise. If we were to get our fiscal house in order, half measures would not suffice. We needed to do more than simply go after the money; we needed to restore fairness to the system by putting the hardworking taxpayers back in charge instead of the union bosses.

  We would have to take on collective bargaining itself.