by Scott Walker
CHAPTER 12
Meet Ms. Sampson
The prank call was a setback, but by taking it head-on and admitting our mistakes we were able to move past it.
Now I had to correct another mistake: my failure to explain to the people of Wisconsin why we needed to reform collective bargaining.
When we first announced our legislation, I had been overly cautious in explaining just how bad some of the collective bargaining rules were. Funny as it sounds now, I did not want to tar all the good government employees in our state by pointing out how some of them were abusing collective bargaining rules to game the system, at a cost of millions of dollars to the Wisconsin taxpayers.
My reticence had prevented me from explaining why collective bargaining had to be changed. It also prevented me from showing how our reforms were truly pro-worker and pro-teacher.
The people most hurt by collective bargaining abuses were dedicated public workers. They were the ones who lost their jobs because the unions would not make concessions. They were the ones laid off first, while workers with seniority saw their jobs protected regardless of performance. They were the ones who had to pick up the slack when less productive workers failed to do their jobs. They were the ones who had union dues collected from their paychecks without their say.
There was another problem. We had expected a seven-day fight, not a monthlong standoff. We quickly ran out of messaging ammunition. We began scrambling to find stories that illustrated the abuses and perverse incentives created by collective bargaining, and sharing them with the people of Wisconsin. Fortunately, the examples were as numerous as they were shocking.
Collective bargaining rules facilitated overtime abuse—allowing some state workers to bilk taxpayers for hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, in February 2010, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that “Madison’s highest paid city government employee last year wasn’t the mayor. It wasn’t the police chief. It wasn’t even the head of Metro Transit. It was [a] bus driver.”1 According to the paper, the driver in question earned $159,258 in 2009—a base salary of $49,366 plus $109,892 in overtime that was guaranteed by a collective bargaining agreement. This individual, and another driver who earned $125,598, were among the city’s top twenty earners, according to the paper. In total, seven City of Madison bus drivers made more than $100,000 per year in 2009.
How did they do it? They were able to double or triple their salary, the paper explained, “thanks to a union contract that lets the most senior drivers who have the highest base salaries get first crack at overtime.” In all, the Madison bus system had spent $1.94 million on overtime in 2009—$467,200 more than the city budgeted and the most ever for the system. But that was not all. The overtime rules in the collective bargaining agreement not only allowed drivers to boost their annual income, they also allowed them to artificially boost their retirement income—because retirement payouts were based on an average of the drivers’ three highest earning years.2 So the costs of the excess overtime would continue for years to come.
Incredibly, Madison Metro general manager Chuck Kamp (who earned $118,690—or $40,568 less than the bus driver working for him) defended the employees’ actions, saying that they were simply following “the rules that have been negotiated with the Teamsters.”
That was precisely the problem. Our reforms, we pointed out, would ensure unions could no longer negotiate those kinds of sweetheart deals into public-worker contracts.
It wasn’t just bus drivers who were taking advantage of the system. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry points out, “Correctional officer collective bargaining agreements allow officers a practice known as ‘sick leave stacking.’ Officers can call in sick for a shift, receiving 8 hours of sick pay, and then are allowed to work the very next shift, earning time-and-a-half for overtime. This results in the officer receiving 2.5 times his or her rate of pay, while still only working 8 hours.” In part because of these practices, Perry points out, thirteen correctional officers made more than $100,000 in 2009—despite earning base wages of less than $60,000 per year. The officers received an average of $66,000 in overtime pay for an average annual salary of more than $123,000—with the highest paid officer receiving $151,181.
Later, when our reforms went into effect, unions could no longer use collective bargaining to impose such schemes on Wisconsin taxpayers. According to the Appleton Post-Crescent, Act 10 cut overtime in the state’s Department of Corrections by $10 million in 20123—a 25 percent drop for an agency responsible for more than half of all state employee overtime.4 The paper reported that the “policy changes—which took effect throughout state government in January 2012 as a result of the state law that eliminated most collective bargaining powers for most public workers—allow time-and-a-half overtime only after 40 working hours in a week. Previously, sick time and vacation counted toward the 40 hours.”
Collective bargaining also facilitated overtime abuse in more subtle ways. For example, my friend Waukesha County Executive Dan Vrakas told me that because of collective bargaining, his parks workers had to be paid between 7:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. If they worked after 3:30 p.m. they had to be paid overtime. Well, when do most people use parks? The answer is simple: after school and on weekends. The union had rigged the system for parks workers to get overtime to work when they were most needed.
Collective bargaining not only allowed public workers to abuse overtime—it also permitted some to collect salaries for not working at all. In Milwaukee County, under collective bargaining rules that mandated paid time off, fourteen employees received salary and benefits for doing union business. Of the fourteen, three were on full-time release for union business—at a cost of over $170,000 in salary alone for these employees to participate only in union activities such as collective bargaining.
Think about that: Milwaukee County taxpayers were paying workers to help unions negotiate the very collective bargaining agreements that perpetuated these kinds of abuses.
They were paying for the privilege of being fleeced!
Collective bargaining also prevented other commonsense reforms to improve services and save taxpayers money. For example, in Racine County, when the state cut back on the amount it would pay to mow along state highways during the summer months in the past, officials had begun using inmates to cut the grass in medians. The inmates volunteered to do the work at no cost to the taxpayers.5 The program not only saved money for the county, it also helped the prisoners by giving them skills and work experience they could carry with them once they returned to the community, which would ultimately help reduce recidivism.
Seems like a commonsense solution?
Not to the union bosses. The county employee union filed a grievance declaring it was the right of government workers to cut the grass—even though there was no money available to pay for the work. The union argued that the reduced sentences the inmates received were “compensation” and thus violated collective bargaining rules. A mediator agreed and the program was shut down.
Later, thanks to Act 10, Racine officials were able not only to reinstate the inmate mowing program, they also expanded it to other areas. On the day our reforms finally kicked in, the Racine Journal Times reported that “with Governor Scott Walker’s collective bargaining changes going into effect today, County Executive Jim Ladwig said inmates will be able to perform more tasks such as landscaping, painting, and shoveling sidewalks in the winter.” Ladwig told the paper, “We have a win-win when we use the inmates. It gives them a sense of value they are helping the community.” At the same time, he told the paper, the county was able maintain property that would otherwise have been neglected.6
None of this would have been possible when the unions still had the power to veto such reforms.
One of the most appalling examples of how collective bargaining defied common sense came when the unions filed a grievance against an eighty-six-year
-old retired man in the Wausau school district. His crime? Volunteering as a school crossing guard.7
Warren Eschenbach lived just two doors down from Riverview Elementary School, and he enjoyed helping the kids get safely to and from school. Eschenbach told Riverview principal Steve Miller, “This gives me a reason to get up in the morning to come and help these kids in the neighborhood.” But the local union that represents crossing guards said he should be banned and replaced by a paid crossing guard hired by the city.
“For a half-an-hour job, do you really need to pay somebody?” Eschenbach asked during an interview with a local TV station.
The answer, according to the union, was yes.
We also found that the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA) had used a policy established by collective bargaining to obtain health insurance coverage that specifically paid for Viagra. Cost to the taxpayers? $786,000 a year. According to ABC News, when the school district cut the Viagra coverage as a cost-saving measure, the teachers’ union actually sued to reinstate it.8
In the Green Bay School District, we found that 140 teachers and 15 administrators (about 1 in 12 teachers in the district) had joined in the district’s “Emeritus Program,” under which teachers can retire and then receive a full year’s salary for working just ten days a year over a three-year period.9 That is in addition to their already guaranteed pension and health care payouts.
Where did the idea for such a boondoggle come from? According to a WLUK-TV Fox 11 news report, “The emeritus program is something that has been negotiated into the teachers’ contract through collective bargaining.”
As we found stories like these, we began pointing out the ways that collective bargaining rules stopped managers from scheduling workers based on operational needs without the advance notice and approval by the union. We explained that collective bargaining prevented managers from adjusting work hours to meet budgets, or reducing hours to prevent layoffs. We showed how they prevented managers from exploring privatization of public services to save taxpayers money. They made government expensive, inefficient, and open to abuse.
But perhaps the most compelling example of how collective bargaining hurt schools and students was the story of a Milwaukee high school teacher named Megan Sampson.
In June 2010, Ms. Sampson was named the outstanding first-year teacher by the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English. A week later, she received another certificate—a layoff notice from the Milwaukee Public Schools system. My predecessor, Governor Doyle, had cut aid to schools without giving them any tools to offset reductions in state aid—which meant they had no choice but to lay off teachers.
But why on earth would they get rid of a great new teacher like Ms. Sampson—especially in Milwaukee, which is one of the most troubled urban school districts in the nation? Well, under the collective bargaining rules, when there were layoffs the last teachers hired were the first to be fired. It didn’t matter that she was one of the best new teachers in the state. She did not have seniority, so she was out. Our reforms eliminated these absurd rules. Now schools can choose whom to keep and whom to retain based on merit, not seniority.
But the story got worse. The reason Ms. Sampson and hundreds of other educators received layoff notices in the first place was that, under collective bargaining, the school district was required to offer teachers a “Cadillac” health care plan and cover 100 percent of the costs—and the teachers’ union would not allow the district to switch to a lower-cost health insurance plan and save the teachers’ jobs. Milwaukee School Board president Michael Bonds told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that if the district switched plans, they could have saved about $48 million—enough to pay for about 480 educators.
“We could literally save hundreds of jobs with the stroke of a pen if teachers switched to the lower-cost health-care plan,” he said, adding “I’m not aware of any place in the nation that pays 100% of teachers’ health-care benefits and doesn’t require a contribution from those who choose to take a more expensive plan.”10
For her part, Ms. Sampson said switching plans should be a no-brainer. “Given the opportunity, of course I would switch to a different plan to save my job, or the jobs of ten other teachers,” she told the paper.
We wanted to give Ms. Sampson and teachers across Wisconsin that opportunity with Act 10.
Her story underscored a critical point: Reforming collective bargaining was necessary not just to close our deficit and balance our budget; it was also needed to restore fundamental fairness to the system.
It was not fair that corrections officers used collective bargaining agreements to more than double their pay by gaming sick leave rules.
It was not fair that bus drivers used collective bargaining to collect so much overtime that they made more money than the mayor—and far more than the taxpayers they drove around town each day.
It was not fair that collective bargaining agreements prevented Racine County from using inmates to mow the grass at no cost to taxpayers.
And it was certainly not fair that an award-winning young teacher like Ms. Sampson had to be thrown out of the classroom because the unions would not permit the school district to switch to a lower-cost health plan and because collective bargaining rules would not allow school officials to take merit into account when determining whom to lay off.
At the start of the debate, when we argued for bringing public-worker benefits closer in line with people in the productive sector of the economy, we had the fairness argument on our side. Then, when the unions conceded on benefits and made it a fight about collective bargaining “rights,” they took the initiative in the fight over fairness. Now, by telling stories like these, we slowly started to reclaim the moral high ground in the fairness debate.
The experience taught me an important lesson: Fairness is one of the strongest arguments we have in politics. Never, ever, cede it to the other side. People won’t care about the effectiveness of your policies if they are not first convinced that your policies are also morally right. To win any public policy fight, you have to be able to first win the “fairness” debate.
Going forward, I was determined to do just that—to make not just the economic but also the moral case for our reforms. So I made sure that everyone in Wisconsin got to know Ms. Sampson. I shared her story in speeches, television and radio interviews, and even columns written in national publications.
Later, I would meet Ms. Sampson myself—in circumstances that neither of us could have possibly foreseen.
CHAPTER 13
Enter the Thunderdome
Mr. Speaker, I can’t guarantee your safety.
It was Friday, February 18, and with the Democratic senators still on the run, the state assembly was preparing to take up the bill. The crowds inside the capitol had surged to unprecedented proportions and were growing increasingly agitated. Capitol police chief Charles Tubbs came to Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald’s office and told him it was no longer safe for the legislators to be in the building. If the protesters decided to rush the assembly floor, he did not have enough manpower to stop them.1
Fitzgerald had the votes to pass the bill, but now the police were warning him that there could be a riot if he proceeded with a vote. He had no choice but to suspend debate and recess for the weekend.
That was a big risk. He had seen bills with much stronger support unravel and fall apart. The lawmakers had not been back to their districts since the fight over Act 10 began, and Jeff worried what Republicans were going to hear from their constituents. Were people elsewhere in the state as upset as the folks in Madison? Was it perceived that Republicans had gone too far? If what the legislators heard back home echoed what they were hearing in the capitol, the debate over Act 10 would be finished.
That weekend, as the legislators fanned out across the state, Representative Robin Vos decided to get some errands done back home.2 He stopped by Catrine’s, a little thre
e-chair barbershop in downtown Racine, to get a haircut. As he sat down for a trim, everyone in the shop was talking about the protests in Madison. The fellow in the chair next to Robin explained how his daughter had just been laid off and had to move back in with them because she couldn’t afford to pay her rent. “So when I hear these folks say they don’t need to pay towards their pension and health insurance,” the man said, “I can’t believe how out of touch they are.”
The fellow in the other chair told Robin that he was an architect, and had just had his pay reduced by 25 percent with one week’s notice. “I’m not complaining,” he says, “because I’m just happy to have a job. But when I hear these people telling me they want a guaranteed job and they don’t want any reduction in their pay when times are tough, I say [EXPLETIVE] them.”
And the first guy says, “You know, you’re doing the right thing, Robin, that’s why we sent you guys there; you’ve got to fix this.”
It was the same all across the state. As the legislators came back to Madison the next week, they all had similar stories about walking into their local diner and getting a round of applause, or people coming up to them and saying, “Hang in there.” Far from weakening his caucus, the involuntary recess had actually strengthened their resolve.
While the legislators were out of town, we used mutual-aid agreements to bring hundreds of additional police officers from counties across the state to Madison. With security at the capitol strengthened, on Tuesday, February 22, the assembly met again to begin debate.
In the morning, I went over to meet with the GOP caucus. That day, I got a taste of what it is like to be a University of Wisconsin running back as the state troopers formed a “flying wedge” to get me through the masses in the capitol. We learned it is impossible to program the antique elevators in the capitol to skip floors, so the elevator doors opened on each floor as we went up to the fourth-floor meeting room. Fortunately, none of the protesters recognized me behind the phalanx of troopers. If they had, a real riot might have started.