February 22, 2011--On Wisconsin
There is only one thing you need to know about what's going on in Wisconsin, and it doesn't have to do with their budget deficit or money.
As we have been hearing, though they are denying it, the real goal of the Republican governor and legislators is to rescind public employees' right to form unions. They say that they "only" want to eliminate that part of existing collective bargaining agreements that give public employees, and they mean primarily teachers, the right to participate in the management of their own work.
Unionized teachers, for example, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, have the contractual power to decide many things about how their places of employment, schools, are run. More about this in a moment, but you do not have to read too carefully between the lines to see that, for all intents and purposes, the governor wants to abrogate existing contracts and thereby effectively end municipal unions as we have come to know them these 40 years.
Unions have been the villains before in the way Republicans view the world. They literally fought against them when they began to form in the late 19th century, often hiring private Pinkerton Guards to serve as strikebreakers (the original scabs); and if that didn't work, got governments to call out the National Guard and if necessary federal troops to keep factories open, even if it meant firing on workers, wounding and killing scores.
Closer to now, in 1981, Ronald Reagan, in a dramatic act of union defiance, fired all federal air traffic controllers when they went on strike and hired replacements. This sent shock waves through the union movement; and since that time, employers have been emboldened and the number of unionized workers has declined precipitously.
When in 2008 the Great Recession cut deeply into the economy, the poster people chosen by the GOP to personify what caused it were not the Wall Street manipulators but rather the autoworkers' union, the UAW. If only their union could be busted, if was ranted, all would be well in heartland America. Investment bankers walked away scot-free and are again making millions in bonuses, while UAW members were forced to give back many of their benefits as the price for a government bailout of GM and Chrysler.
Now that nearly every state has serious fiscal problems, simple explanations are again being sought to "understand" and explain what has happened. And once again unions have been selected to be blamed. Municipal unions now, since state and city workers' salaries, benefits, and pensions are without doubt a huge part of every state and city budget.
In Wisconsin, union members quickly accepted the fact that the state was experiencing a fiscal crisis and conceded that they would have to agree to givebacks. This has not satisfied Governor Walker and his Republican legislative colleagues. They want more than budget cuts--they want to eliminate the municipal unions. And so we are seeing a dramatic impasse with Democratic legislators hiding in other states so as to deny the GOP a legislative quorum to take punitive action against the unions themselves.
A clue to what is actually going on is the fact that Governor Walker has not asked the state's uniformed workers to give anything back. The police and firefighters are exempt. One might wonder why this would be. Aren't they all in this together? Shouldn't everyone there have to pitch in and give back proportionately?
If one is looking for simple answers, there is one regarding this: the police and firefighters unions were major supporters--financial supporters--of candidate Walker when he ran for governor last year. The other unions weighed in significantly for his opponent.
Thus the vendetta against the teachers.
There are national implications here--unions have been the major funders of Democratic candidates for decades--from city council members to the president of the United States. If they can be eliminated, or at least further reduced, Democrats' major source of support would be curtailed. This is especially true for government worker unions since they have been growing in membership while industrial unions have been contracting as more and more manufacturing has been shipped overseas.
So what happens in Wisconsin will decidedly not stay in Wisconsin. It, after all, is the state where the Progressive movement first took hold and municipal unions formed.
Having said this, there is a case to be made, perhaps even by Progressives, that some of teachers' unions powers should be ratcheted back.
If teachers were performing more effectively, if academic achievement gaps had been closing, if more low-income students were graduating from high school and enrolling in colleges, they would have a better case to make. But at a time when the entire middle class is worried about the security of their jobs and benefits, if they are fortunate enough to have any, there is not much sympathy for low-performing government workers who have lifetime job security through Civil Service rules or school tenure policies, and benefits that extend to their spouses even after they have died,
Thus, again in regard to teachers, their contracts need to be renegotiated--not out of existence, but to eliminate things in them that hamstring school principals and superintendents who have no say about who gets tenure, who earns seniority, who gets assigned to what class, who gets laid off if there are budget cuts, who gets relieved of their jobs if they are deemed to be ineffective--or even how that is determined, how many hours and minutes can be scheduled for instruction versus "preparation time," or, as incredible as it may seem, how large bulletin boards are required to be in teachers' lounges and which telephones they can use, at taxpayer expense, to conduct union business.
For a sense of how non-public employees view the work lives and benefits of Wisconsin's government workers, see the linked article from today's New York Times. Resentment runs deep even in this formerly-union-friendly state. There is very little sympathy for teachers and other state and county employees while everyone else is slipping further and further behind.
And since this is even truer elsewhere (Wisconsin's unemployment rate is "only" 7 percent), as the Badger State goes, so will go the nation.
As we have been hearing, though they are denying it, the real goal of the Republican governor and legislators is to rescind public employees' right to form unions. They say that they "only" want to eliminate that part of existing collective bargaining agreements that give public employees, and they mean primarily teachers, the right to participate in the management of their own work.
Unionized teachers, for example, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, have the contractual power to decide many things about how their places of employment, schools, are run. More about this in a moment, but you do not have to read too carefully between the lines to see that, for all intents and purposes, the governor wants to abrogate existing contracts and thereby effectively end municipal unions as we have come to know them these 40 years.
Unions have been the villains before in the way Republicans view the world. They literally fought against them when they began to form in the late 19th century, often hiring private Pinkerton Guards to serve as strikebreakers (the original scabs); and if that didn't work, got governments to call out the National Guard and if necessary federal troops to keep factories open, even if it meant firing on workers, wounding and killing scores.
Closer to now, in 1981, Ronald Reagan, in a dramatic act of union defiance, fired all federal air traffic controllers when they went on strike and hired replacements. This sent shock waves through the union movement; and since that time, employers have been emboldened and the number of unionized workers has declined precipitously.
When in 2008 the Great Recession cut deeply into the economy, the poster people chosen by the GOP to personify what caused it were not the Wall Street manipulators but rather the autoworkers' union, the UAW. If only their union could be busted, if was ranted, all would be well in heartland America. Investment bankers walked away scot-free and are again making millions in bonuses, while UAW members were forced to give back many of their benefits as the price for a government bailout of GM and Chrysler.
Now that nearly every state has serious fiscal problems, simple explanations are again being sought to "understand" and explain what has happened. And once again unions have been selected to be blamed. Municipal unions now, since state and city workers' salaries, benefits, and pensions are without doubt a huge part of every state and city budget.
In Wisconsin, union members quickly accepted the fact that the state was experiencing a fiscal crisis and conceded that they would have to agree to givebacks. This has not satisfied Governor Walker and his Republican legislative colleagues. They want more than budget cuts--they want to eliminate the municipal unions. And so we are seeing a dramatic impasse with Democratic legislators hiding in other states so as to deny the GOP a legislative quorum to take punitive action against the unions themselves.
A clue to what is actually going on is the fact that Governor Walker has not asked the state's uniformed workers to give anything back. The police and firefighters are exempt. One might wonder why this would be. Aren't they all in this together? Shouldn't everyone there have to pitch in and give back proportionately?
If one is looking for simple answers, there is one regarding this: the police and firefighters unions were major supporters--financial supporters--of candidate Walker when he ran for governor last year. The other unions weighed in significantly for his opponent.
Thus the vendetta against the teachers.
There are national implications here--unions have been the major funders of Democratic candidates for decades--from city council members to the president of the United States. If they can be eliminated, or at least further reduced, Democrats' major source of support would be curtailed. This is especially true for government worker unions since they have been growing in membership while industrial unions have been contracting as more and more manufacturing has been shipped overseas.
So what happens in Wisconsin will decidedly not stay in Wisconsin. It, after all, is the state where the Progressive movement first took hold and municipal unions formed.
Having said this, there is a case to be made, perhaps even by Progressives, that some of teachers' unions powers should be ratcheted back.
If teachers were performing more effectively, if academic achievement gaps had been closing, if more low-income students were graduating from high school and enrolling in colleges, they would have a better case to make. But at a time when the entire middle class is worried about the security of their jobs and benefits, if they are fortunate enough to have any, there is not much sympathy for low-performing government workers who have lifetime job security through Civil Service rules or school tenure policies, and benefits that extend to their spouses even after they have died,
Thus, again in regard to teachers, their contracts need to be renegotiated--not out of existence, but to eliminate things in them that hamstring school principals and superintendents who have no say about who gets tenure, who earns seniority, who gets assigned to what class, who gets laid off if there are budget cuts, who gets relieved of their jobs if they are deemed to be ineffective--or even how that is determined, how many hours and minutes can be scheduled for instruction versus "preparation time," or, as incredible as it may seem, how large bulletin boards are required to be in teachers' lounges and which telephones they can use, at taxpayer expense, to conduct union business.
For a sense of how non-public employees view the work lives and benefits of Wisconsin's government workers, see the linked article from today's New York Times. Resentment runs deep even in this formerly-union-friendly state. There is very little sympathy for teachers and other state and county employees while everyone else is slipping further and further behind.
And since this is even truer elsewhere (Wisconsin's unemployment rate is "only" 7 percent), as the Badger State goes, so will go the nation.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
4:31 AM
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