Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (34 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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And the people of Wisconsin sided with the rebellion.

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 was accomplished without the new taxes that unions favored.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.

While the unions let Pandora out of the box in Wisconsin, they kept her locked securely inside in Ohio.

In March 2011, Ohio governor John Kasich rammed through a bill similar to the Wisconsin law. It reduced some of the unions’ collective bargaining power over public workers and got rid of binding arbitration
in labor disputes. Public workers were banned from striking and teachers’ salaries were tied to test scores. The bill passed narrowly in the State Senate, by a vote of 17–16.
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But there was a difference. In Wisconsin, the reform law actually went into effect—and the people of Wisconsin saw its benefits. As the
Wall Street Journal
explains about the Wisconsin reforms: “Attempts to modernize government are always controversial, but support usually builds over time as the public comes to appreciate the benefits of structural change.”
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But in Ohio, the law never did go into effect—and so the citizens of Ohio never got to experience the benefits that the law would bring.

What else was different in Ohio? First, Kasich didn’t make the moral case for curtailing collective bargaining. He focused instead on budgetary issues, a crucial public relations mistake on his part. Second, Kasich’s job-approval rating was already low. Third, Kasich didn’t exclude public safety workers from his reforms, like Walker had. The people were afraid of being left unprotected by striking police and firefighters.
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Finally, the unions spent more than $40 million on the repeal effort, outspending the pro-bill forces 3 to 1.
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For all these reasons, the government employee unions quickly gathered enough signatures to start a referendum on the law. And predictably, in November 2011, the bill was recalled by a wide margin, 61–39.

Since the law was repealed, Ohio has continued to sink into an economic morass. Firings are the order of the day. In Marion, Ohio, the budget situation caused the firing of fifteen police officers, delaying response times to emergency 911 calls. Teachers unions are threatening to strike for higher pay, even as the teachers themselves are getting the ax.
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As
Red State
reported, “Ohio’s public workers are enjoying the sort of union victory that’s often accompanied by a pink slip.”
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The battle continues in New Jersey. Chris Christie is the Han Solo of this story, fighting the Imperial forces once again.
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In a memorable speech to the New Jersey legislature, Mr. Christie branded “pensions and benefits” as “the major driver of our spending
increases at all levels of government—state, county, municipal, and school board.” And, like Walker, he made the moral case against the government employee unions: “Is it ‘fair,’ ” he asked, “for all of us and our children to pay for this excess?”

During 2010, Christie convinced his Democrat-controlled legislature to pass a budget for the year that closed the state deficit without raising taxes.
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Christie admits that he has further to go before New Jersey could be considered in good financial shape. As Christie has pointed out, New Jersey is “never going to have enough money to pay that $50 billion” shortfall that it needs to pay future government employee pensions. The same is true for its $67 billion shortfall for funding retiree health-care costs.
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To bring New Jersey’s government spending in line, Christie ultimately will have to lay off many government employees. This is what happens when government employee unions come into conflict with reality: jobs get lost.

Other rebel forces are beginning to get it, too. North Carolina recently passed a law over Democrat governor Bev Perdue’s veto, barring the state from collecting dues automatically from teachers’ paychecks on behalf of teachers unions—the dues checkoff provision that unions value so much.
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Governor Perdue, who took $1.8 million from the unions in her 2008 governor’s race and benefited from another $1.7 million in campaign ads paid for by the unions, complained that the vote took place “in the dark of night,” because it was passed at 1 a.m.
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Nonetheless, repealing dues checkoff is likely to substantially curb teachers union membership in the state of North Carolina as in other states where it has been repealed.