by Scott Walker
That meant not only kids were missing school, it also meant that many hardworking parents had to take unpaid days off from their jobs to watch their kids—all thanks to the protests.
And to make matters worse, while the parents were losing pay because school was closed, physicians had set up stations at the capitol to write doctors’ notes for the teachers so that they would not lose their pay. The MacIver Institute filmed some of the doctors roaming the crowds handing out sick notes, and posted the video on YouTube.12 In the video, an interviewer asks a woman in a white medical coat what she and her colleagues are doing:
“We are writing sick notes for anybody who needs them,” she says.
“Who’s sick?” the interviewer asks.
“Everybody is sick of Scott Walker,” she replies.
The doctors and teachers were lying to their employers and defrauding the taxpayers. Later, when the protests were over, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that “UW School of Medicine and Public Health disciplined 20 doctors for writing questionable sick notes for protesters last year . . . with three doctors getting the harshest penalty: fines of up to $4,000 and loss of leadership positions for four months.”13 Meanwhile, the paper reported that the state Medical Examining Board reprimanded thirteen doctors and gave seven others administrative warnings.14
So each day, thousands of kids missed school and thousands of parents missed work so that the teachers could cut class and fight to preserve benefits that the parents could only dream of.
For the unions, that was a public relations disaster.
Our argument, by contrast, was simple and compelling: It was not fair that public workers enjoyed better benefits and better job security than their employers (the people of Wisconsin), who were losing their jobs and benefits in the worst economy in modern times.
Most people in Wisconsin agreed. We were winning the “fairness” debate.
But that was about to change.
CHAPTER 9
A Racket, Not a Right
On Friday, February 18, I traveled to Volk Field to welcome home Task Force Badger, the 724th Engineer Battalion of the Wisconsin National Guard. Nearly one thousand friends and family braved freezing cold temperatures to greet three hundred of Wisconsin’s bravest citizens on their return from their second tour of combat duty in Iraq. They had been responsible for clearing some two hundred thousand kilometers of routes across the country—including the dangerous task of searching for and removing roadside bombs.1
It was so uplifting to be with those returning soldiers. But what blew me away was how many of the troops and their families came up and said, “Hey governor, you’ve got guts” (along with some other more colorful descriptions of my fortitude).
It was also one of the first moments I realized that, outside of Madison, there were people who really appreciated what we were doing. It taught me an important lesson: When you come under attack, one of the best things you can do is get out of the capital. There may have been tens of thousands of people protesting in Madison, but for every protester, there were thousands who stood with us, and their support sustained Tonette and our family in the most difficult moments.
I recall on one trip when an airport worker at the town we flew into came up to me and handed me a piece of paper. I looked at it when I got into the plane. It read: “Isaiah 54:17.” I pulled out my phone and looked up the passage: “No weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.”
On another occasion, as I sat in a chair on the set of a morning television show in Green Bay, the floor manager, kneeling down next to me to put on my microphone, whispered to me that she and her kids got down on their knees each night and prayed for me and my family.
Those kinds of moments inspired me throughout the fight over Act 10. The more I got out of the capital, the better it was, for both me and for my family. I was so moved by all the people I met who told me that their families were praying for us. It meant the world to us. I resolved to spend less time listening to the drums and horns outside my window and more time listening to the folks in factories and farms and small businesses across the state whose voices were being drowned out by the agitators in Madison.
While I was visiting with our returning troops, back in Madison the unions were beating a tactical retreat.
Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly agreed it was unfair that public sector workers should receive lavish benefits that private sector workers could only dream about—especially in an economy where many were losing their benefits, if not losing their jobs. Increasingly, the unions realized they were getting clobbered on equity and fairness, and that holding out for their current benefits was a losing scenario.
So on February 18, the leaders of the Wisconsin chapter of AFSCME and the Wisconsin teachers union announced that they would accept the 5.8 percent increase in health care premiums and 12.6 percent toward their pensions, so long as we promised not to take away their collective bargaining “rights.”
It was a smart move. Our internal polls showed that 73 percent of Wisconsinites backed requiring public employees to pay more for health insurance and 80 percent supported requiring them to contribute to their pensions. By contrast, they opposed ending collective bargaining by a margin of 51 to 46 percent.
By conceding the point on benefits, the unions reclaimed the high ground in the fairness debate. Instead of defending their lavish benefits, they were now defending their collective bargaining “rights.” No one wants to see “rights” taken away from anyone. And they began to hammer that message home. If there had been any doubt who had directed the move, the national AFL-CIO quickly put up a powerful TV ad featuring a Wisconsin fireman who declared, “Governor Walker, public employees have agreed to the cuts you asked for, and now they’re simply asking that you not take away their rights.”2
Of course, the union offer was not serious. Having been a local official for eight years, I knew that just because two statewide union bosses said they would accept the increased pension and health care contributions, it did not mean those increases would be implemented by unions at the local level. Contracts are not negotiated statewide but by local collective bargaining units in Wisconsin’s 424 school districts, more than 1,700 municipalities, and 72 counties.
Indeed, we saw local union after local union go to their school boards and city councils and try to “Walker-proof” their benefits—rushing through contracts that had no contributions to the pension and no increased contribution to health care.
On February 16, for example, the Janesville Gazette ran a story titled “Cities rush to settle contracts before Legislature approves bill.” It reported:
Some area municipalities are hurrying to settle union contracts before a vote is taken on Governor Scott Walker’s proposal to curtail collective bargaining rights.
In Janesville, the city Tuesday reached tentative agreements with three of its unions and will meet with representatives of a fourth today or Thursday. The contracts for Janesville’s four unions expired in December.
In Evansville, city officials contacted the union representing the majority of city staff other than police and library and offered to strike a deal before the state forced its hand.
In Milton, city administrator Jerry Schuetz said the city’s been working on labor contracts with its police and public works employees as part of “business as normal” and planned to consider final approval of both contracts this week.
If the agreements are ratified before the legislation is passed, the municipalities would not be able to take advantage of any cost savings the legislation is expected to yield. . . .
In Evansville, the city on Tuesday called Teamsters Local No. 695, which represents the majority of city clerical staff, public works and water and light employees, and “offered that if we can strike a bargain locally rather than have our hands forced, we’re open to it,” city administrato
r Dan Wietecha said.
“(That) means someone needs to nail down a lot of stuff in the next day (or two),” he said. . . .
The city wrote this year’s budget expecting no increases in salaries and no increases or savings in retirement and health insurance, Wietecha said.
“We don’t need to suddenly change just because there’s a new variable,” he said.3
The Wisconsin Radio Network similarly reported that “the rush is on to get local contracts approved ahead of the governor’s budget repair bill taking effect, including in Racine.”4 Contracts without increased health care and pension contributions were approved not only in Racine but also in La Crosse County, Sheboygan County, Madison, and at the Milwaukee Area Technical College. (When an official at the college was asked if the school was “rushing” through the contract to beat the legislative clock, she replied, “Rush is such a subjective word.”)5
In Janesville, the unions were actually pushing through a pay increase.
“Actions do speak louder than words,” I said, explaining why we rejected the union “offer.”
While local unions tried to push through last-minute deals to protect their benefits, the national and state union officials had a bigger concern—protecting the system of political cronyism that allowed them to perpetuate their political power.
The unions liked to paint collective bargaining as a civil “right,” like free speech. But collective bargaining isn’t a right, it’s a racket. Here is how the scam works in the public sector:
1. The government automatically collects compulsory union dues from the paychecks of public workers.
2. The government then gives the money to the union bosses.
3. The union bosses then give that money to pro-union politicians in the form of campaign contributions.
4. The union-backed politicians use that money to get elected.
5. Once elected, the union-backed politicians then sit across the table from the union bosses to “negotiate”—purportedly on behalf of the taxpayers.
6. But instead of representing the taxpayers, they do the bidding of the unions by providing excessive wages, benefits, and pensions.
7. They line the pockets of union bosses through sweetheart deals, such as contracts requiring school districts to buy insurance from union-affiliated insurers, like the Wisconsin Education Association (WEA) Trust, when they could have gotten much cheaper insurance on the open market.
8. Taxpayers lose tens of millions every year in higher health insurance costs—money that could have gone into classrooms but instead goes to the union bosses.
9. The union bosses then line the campaign coffers of the politicians with whom they just negotiated all over again, so they can elect more pro-union politicians who will continue this racket.
10. The cycle starts all over again.
This is why, as George Will so eloquently put it, public sector unions are nothing more than “government organized as a special interest to lobby itself to expand itself.”6
Collective bargaining gives the union bosses the keys to the statehouse, city hall, and school. It allows them to effectively sit on both sides of the bargaining table when contracts are negotiated, while no one represents the interests of the taxpayers (whose money is at stake) or the children (whose education hangs in the balance). It is cronyism, plain and simple.
Case in point: When I was Milwaukee County executive, the chair of the board of supervisors’ personnel committee, Pat Jursik, recalled how some of her colleagues actually wanted to bring the unions in to talk about the contracts before they started the negotiations.
Why on earth would they want to do that, she asked them? They explained to Supervisor Jursik that they needed to listen to the unions and take their interests into account as they formulated their negotiating positions. She was incredulous. “We’re management, they are labor,” she told them. Why would they want to bring in the unions to discuss what the position should be in negotiations with the unions? Why would we meet with them like a group of constituents?
The answer is that this is precisely how they saw the unions—as their constituents. They thought their job was to represent the unions’ interests in negotiations. They were negotiating with the unions and on behalf of the unions at the same time. Supervisor Jursik had to explain to them the basic premise that they were supposed to negotiate on behalf of Milwaukee County taxpayers, not the unions. Their job was not to meet with the unions and find out what the unions needed. It was to sit down with the department heads and other constitutional officers and find out what they needed in a contract. And then they were supposed to get the best possible deal they could for them and for the taxpayers.
Supervisor Jursik’s story illustrates one of the fundamental problems with collective bargaining: It creates a kind of “Stockholm syndrome” among local officials. They are held hostage by the unions but end up sympathizing with, and advocating for, their captors.
My friend New Jersey governor Chris Christie recalls how his predecessor, Jon Corzine, once stood on the front steps of the state capitol in Trenton at a public sector union rally and yelled, “We will fight for a fair contract!”7 Chris wondered: Who exactly was he going to fight? Himself? Corzine was running to represent the people of New Jersey, but he was promising to represent the unions at the negotiating table.
This is why what we did in Wisconsin so enraged the union bosses and sparked their unprecedented campaign to stop us. They could live with it if we were to lay off tens of thousands of workers. They could live with it if we cut aid to schools and local governments. They could live with it if we raised workers’ contributions to their pensions and health care premiums.
What they could not live with is if we broke up the system of cronyism and corruption that allowed them to preserve their power and perpetuate their prerogatives.
So long as they succeeded in protecting that system, they could wait us out and then go back and restore spending or change the health and pension deal after we left office. But if we succeeded in dismantling the corrupt system itself, not only would our changes stay in place in the short term, but the entire apparatus they had created for sucking up taxpayer dollars would be upended—permanently.
Without the automatic collection of dues, the union bosses could no longer force public workers to involuntarily fill the union offers. Without the power to negotiate anything but wages (capped at the CPI), there was little incentive for public workers to send their dues voluntarily or vote to recertify the union. Without the monopoly they had enjoyed on health insurance, the unions could no longer force schools to buy gold-plated health plans at inflated prices. And with the spigot of free money turned off, the unions could no longer control who sat across from them at the negotiating table.
They quickly realized that what we were doing was qualitatively different from what had been done in other states: We didn’t just go after the money. We decided to fix the entire system.
So it came as no surprise when the unions gave up the fight against increasing health and pension contributions, and focused their efforts on defending their protection racket. In the end, for the unions, it was all about the money. The only thing they ultimately cared about was keeping the automatic withholding of union dues from the paychecks of Wisconsin’s approximately three hundred thousand public workers.
The unions were willing to give up anything to keep their hands on that cash. They were worried that given a free choice, their members would choose to keep the money for themselves.
As we would later learn, they were right to be worried. But for now, their retreat on benefits had succeeded in shifting the terms of the debate in their favor. They were starting to sway folks outside of Madison (including many who supported me) that what we were doing was fundamentally unfair—that we were trying to take away people’s “rights.”
We would have to reclaim the moral h
igh ground.
CHAPTER 10
“Scott, Why Are You Doing This?”
The union offer on pensions and health care was nothing more than a political ploy to buy time, but it was an effective one.
Not long after the unions made their announcement, my chief political strategist, R. J. Johnson, took me aside and said, “Governor, you’re in trouble.”
Polls showed that people agreed with our demand that public workers contribute to their pensions and health benefits to put them more in line with private sector workers, he explained. That seemed only fair. But now that the unions had “conceded,” people did not understand why we were still insisting on changing collective bargaining itself. Even Republicans were telling pollsters, “I voted for the governor, but I don’t understand why he is doing this.” The unions were effectively reframing the debate, and I was sliding precipitously in the polls. R.J. told me we needed to get the bill passed as soon as possible.
I took note of his concerns, but I was not terribly worried. I was confident that once we got the bill enacted, the reforms would eventually sell themselves. I was absolutely certain from my experience in Milwaukee County that they would save money, strengthen education, and improve public services. And once people saw that that was the case, they would come around. We just had to put our shoulders to the grindstone, not give in to union pressure, and pass the reforms.
As the intensity of the protests grew, Tonette became increasingly worried about me, our family, and our safety. The vitriol that was being directed at us, the people picketing outside our home, distressed her to no end.
One night we were standing in our bedroom and she turned to me, visibly upset, and said: “Scott, why are you doing this?”
The question took me aback. At first, I thought she was blaming me for the protests. But it was more than that.