Fitful negotiations in Wisconsin

Republican Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic state senators sought a negotiated compromise to their standoff over collective-bargaining rights this week, with each side offering concessions. Some of the 14 Democrats who fled the state on Feb. 17 hinted that they were prepared to return, restoring the quorum Walker needs to pass a bill to plug a $3.6 billion hole in the state budget. Before doing so, however, they wanted to meet Walker near the Illinois border to negotiate changes. He refused, but in e-mails to the absent Democrats, offered to amend his proposal to allow public unions to negotiate over salary increases and issues such as mandatory overtime, hazardous-duty pay, and classroom size for teachers. But Walker still insists on stripping unions of power to bargain over benefits.

In a similar battle in Indiana, Democratic legislators stayed in Illinois for a third week to deny Republicans a quorum to pass anti-union legislation. And in Ohio unionists protested outside the capitol as the Republican-controlled legislature was poised to support a senate bill blunting collective-bargaining powers.

“We’re broke! We’re broke!” said The New York Times in an editorial. That’s the “scare tactic” Gov. Walker and fellow

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Republicans use to “break unions and kill programs they never liked in flush years.” Americans aren’t fooled. A poll last week found that 61 percent oppose Walker’s attempt to strip public unions of their bargaining rights. The Republican Party’s union-busting image will cost it many votes in the next election.

Gov. Walker “shouldn’t sweat’’ the results of polls, which also show his own popularity dropping, said Spencer Abraham in The Weekly Standard. Slashing taxes and public-sector spending doesn’t win popularity contests in the short term. But if “Walker and those who stand with him” finally put Wisconsin in the black, they’ll be more popular than ever.

We won’t know who won this fight until the next election, said Andrew Leonard in Salon.com. But at least the stalemate has given “the entire nation the time to take a close look” at the role of unions. It’s hard not to conclude that public-sector workers in particular are “taking a politically motivated fall for state budget woes that are largely the result of the recession.”