Wisconsin’s battle over labor rights

What happened

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker this week confronted protests by tens of thousands of teachers, state workers, and their supporters who converged on the capitol in a battle over union rights that quickly spread to other states. The Republican governor, who is facing a $137 million budget shortfall this year and a $3.6 billion gap over the next two years, has already won concessions from union leaders, who agreed to an increase in the amount public workers pay for health care and pensions. The concessions equal roughly a 7 percent cut in pay. But Walker, who is in his first weeks in office, says that an end to the collective-​bargaining rights of state employees is also necessary to deal with the fiscal crisis; otherwise, he said, mass layoffs would begin within weeks. “For us, it’s simple,” Walker said. “We’re broke.”

Last week, Wisconsin’s 14 Democratic senators fled the state in order to deprive the Republican-majority legislature of the quorum necessary to pass legislation restricting collective bargaining. Democratic legislators in Indiana followed suit this week, avoiding a legislative session in order to thwart a bill weakening bargaining rights. In Ohio, several thousand pro-union demonstrators chanted “kill the bill” this week as the legislature weighed similar legislation backed by Republican Gov. John Kasich.

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What the editorials said

“The numbers don’t lie,” said the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Wisconsin’s fiscal crisis is real,” and the benefits lavished on public employees have to stop. The union concessions—requiring employees to contribute 5.8 percent of pay to their pensions and 12.6 percent to their health-care costs—still make for “a far better deal than most private-sector employees receive.” And Wisconsin is just the tip of the fiscal iceberg, said The Washington Post. “States face a combined $555 billion in unfunded retiree health-coverage liabilities.” That budget crisis is “rooted partly in unsustainable employee compensation systems.”

So why won’t Gov. Walker accept the ample concessions that state unions have offered? said The New York Times. Because this battle isn’t really about budget deficits—it’s about union busting. Like Republican politicians in Ohio and Indiana, Walker wants to crush unions so they’re “no longer able to raise money to oppose him, as they did in last year’s election.” Curiously, the two public unions Walker has conspicuously exempted—police and firefighters—both backed his campaign last year.

What the columnists said

Public unions are purely political creatures in the first place, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. Private-sector unions at least have a rationale: protecting individual workers from being overrun by more powerful corporations. Public unions protect workers not from bosses but from hard-pressed taxpayers. Worse, when union leaders sit down at the negotiating table, all too often they have bankrolled the campaigns of the public officials with whom they’re negotiating. The inevitable result of this “insidious” relationship is an “explosion in the cost of government.”

This isn’t about cost, it’s about “power,” said Ezra Klein in The Washington Post. While Walker is demanding savings from state employees and the low-income citizens who rely on public services, he’s also advocating a cut in corporate taxes—which will increase the state’s deficit—and proposing no-bid sales of government assets. Public employees aren’t responsible for the huge deficits in state budgets, said David Brooks in The New York Times. And any politically sustainable resolution will require broadly shared sacrifice. “There will never be public acceptance” if political opponents carry the brunt of the load while political favorites are spared. “Gov. Walker’s program fails that test.”

Actually, his plan has already succeeded, said Yuval Levin in National Review Online. “By focusing on both the level of government-worker benefits and their power to bargain collectively for those benefits, he has brought union officials” to accept real benefit cuts. That’s a victory. The next phase is to roll back “some of the enormous power built up by public workers over the past few decades.” And in the long run, the solution to “the growing conflict between public employees and the public” is a smaller government.