Scott Walker and the Fate of the Union

Essential reading for the 2016 election: Dan Kaufman's June 12th article from The New York Times Magazine.

[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/magazine/scott-walker-and-the-fate-of-the-union.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0[/url]

It is particularly bitter for Walker’s opponents that his rise has taken place in Wisconsin, a blue state with a long history of labor activism; it was the first state in the nation to grant collective-­bargaining rights to public employees, in 1959. Walker, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has won three races for governor, one a recall effort, and each time he took more than a third of the votes from union households. He was able to do this by making “labor” seem like someone else — even to union members — and pitting one faction against another. Four years ago, in a private exchange captured by a documentary filmmaker, he revealed his successful strategy to a billionaire supporter who asked him if Wisconsin would ever become a right-to-work state. Walker responded enthusiastically, explaining that Act 10 was just the beginning of a larger effort. “The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public-­employee unions,” he said, “because you use divide-­and-­conquer.”

At the Capitol, dozens of state troopers (who kept their bargaining rights) and Capitol police officers (who lost theirs) were now patrolling the rotunda to prevent it from being occupied again. The Senate hearing room was already packed, so Bryce watched the hearing on monitors outside while he waited for his turn to speak. First came the expert witnesses. James Sherk, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that unions operate as cartels: “They try to control the supply of labor in an industry so as to drive up its price, namely wages. But like all cartels, these gains come at the cost of greater losses to the rest of society.” Greg Mourad, a spokesman for a lobbying organization called the National Right to Work Committee, which has received significant funding from the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, compared the experience of being made to pay union dues to being kidnapped and extorted. Gordon Lafer, a political scientist at the University of Oregon, noted on the other hand that while right-to-work laws in other states had generated no identifiable economic gains, they did drive down wages for union and nonunion workers alike.

Ordinary citizens got their chance to speak in the afternoon. Nearly all of them opposed the bill. A crane operator cited statistics showing that workers in right-to-work states are killed on the job more frequently. “Are you prepared to be accountable for the deaths that being a right-to-work state can create?” he asked. Anthony Anastasi, the president of Ironworkers Local 383, broke down in tears as he pleaded to the legislators, “Please think about the families that will be impacted by this.”