Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker became the first American governor to survive a recall election last night. In a rematch of a 2010 contest, he gathered more than 53 percent of the vote and beat Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett — by a margin slightly better than that Walker achieved in 2010.
As is often the case with such events, people want to draw sweeping inferences from this one event. We’ll see many articles about what this means for the future of the public employee unions that brought about Walker’s recall election after he pushed through reforms of public employee collective bargaining rights, for Republican governors in other states, and for President Obama’s reelection prospects. It’s a natural human tendency, I think, to want to see a broad pattern in isolated events — but often those perceived patterns don’t really exist.
Public employee unions aren’t going away. They lost in their bid to unseat Walker in Wisconsin, but they defeated another public employee collective bargaining law in Ohio. Where’s the pattern in that? Members of public employee unions, like other members of private-sector unions, believe in collective bargaining rights. One reason they objected so strongly to Walker’s reforms is that they believe the reforms improperly interfere with fairly gained, bargained-for rights and benefits, won after hard-fought negotiations in which union members may have given in on other issues. In their eyes, the fact that taxpayers and people in the private sector might view those rights and benefits as overly rich is irrelevant, because they are stalwart believers in the collective bargaining process that achieved those rights. Public employee unions in other states aren’t going to roll over just because the unions did not prevail in Wisconsin. If they did, it would undercut the entire idea of public employee labor unions.
I also doubt that Walker’s win is going to charge Republican governors in other states with enthusiasm for taking on public employee unions and pushing sweeping reforms — at least, no more so than is absolutely necessary to achieve balanced budgets and govern responsibly. Walker prevailed, but his actions precipitated a bruising political battle, sidetracked his term with a recall campaign and election, and ultimately resulted in more than $60 million in campaign spending, much of it by organizations outside of Wisconsin. It’s therefore no surprise that Walker was playing the pipes of peace after yesterday’s result. Although politicians love to talk about “fighting” for voters, one way or another, most of them are inveterate compromisers who aren’t looking to pick a knife fight, especially when they know they can’t count on advocacy groups supporting their efforts to the same extent that occurred in Wisconsin.
As for President Obama, he largely stayed out of the Wisconsin recall election fray and will be able to depict it as a one-shot, one-state result that doesn’t have broad national significance. How do you glean national trends from an election rematch that produced pretty much the same result as the initial 2010 election between Walker and Barrett? If there is a lesson there, it is that voters stuck with Walker, despite all of the controversy and protests, in a contest that involved extraordinary spending by both sides. But how many of those Walker voters cast their ballots because they object, in principle, to recall elections under such circumstances? How many were motivated by special concerns not found in the national electorate? I’m just not convinced that the Wisconsin results in June are going to predict much with respect to national results in November.
The Wisconsin recall election is an interesting mid-year event that may be the start of a trend — or it may not.
The pipeline issue posed a difficult political choice — so the Obama Administration punted and blamed Congress. The State Department said that the denial was due to Congress imposing an unreasonable 60-day deadline on the Administration’s decision on the project. Congress, of course, says the 60-day deadline was necessary because the Administration was dithering and proposed to delay any decision until after the 2012 election. The story linked suggests that the Administration’s decision today was motivated by various carefully weighed political considerations.
America used to be fabulous at this type of massive project, like the transcontinental railroad, the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal, or many others. Those projects had broad political support because they promoted development and commerce. Does anyone doubt that Democratic Party icons like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson would approve this pipeline? Conversely, does anyone think the interstate highway system could have been built so speedily if the current regulatory morass that has grown up around consideration of environmental issues existed in the ’50s and ’60s? Consider that, the next time you drive on our interstates and see the hills that have been sheared off or tunneled through so that you can get from point A to point B at 65 mph.
So now we’ll wring our hands, and hire consultants, and do impact studies for months and years more — all the while leaving people without a job unemployed when they could be working, leaving our economy moribund when it could be helped, and leaving our reliance on energy from volatile regions unchecked when it could be reduced. Does any of that really make any sense for our country?
I don’t mind the vulgarity and martial imagery — anybody warming up a crowd at a union event on Labor Day can get carried away, I suppose — but I’m not sure what “war on workers” Hoffa is referring to. Presumably he is talking about the efforts to limit collective bargaining rights for public employees in states like Wisconsin and Ohio. For the most part, however, the agenda of the “tea party” — if such an entity can even be said to exist — seems to be a pro-worker agenda. The “tea party” element wants to restrain the growth of government, keep taxes low, avoid unnecessary regulations that restrict economic growth, and let private enterprise develop and create jobs. What is so “anti-worker” about that?
On April 20, 
It therefore is interesting that in Massachusetts — Massachusetts! — the 
In Ohio, as in Wisconsin and other states, the ability of public employees to engage in collective bargaining is being revisited by the legislature, and the pro-union forces were having a big rally. As we approached the Statehouse along Third Street, buses were rolling up and discharging union members who were joining the rally. The crowd, probably numbered in the hundreds by that point, began a spirited “Kill the bill!” chant. Union members were handing out fliers with the schedule for the day. The TV trucks were there, with their satellite dishes extended, and we ran into an NPS radio reporter who was happy to have some good audio to use in her report. As we turned the corner of the Statehouse, we saw more union members heading toward the rally. At the corner of Broad and High we watched as a firefighters bagpipe and drum corps marched by playing some unknown tune, their kilts flapping in the cold winter wind. A policeman who was holding back traffic gave a high five to one of the marchers. By the time we got back to the firm, a helicopter — probably from one of the local stations — was hovering overhead to get some crowd shots. And when I drove home that night I heard that the rally would be capped by a lawsuit contesting the decisions on how many of the rally attendees were permitted to enter the Statehouse.
The key issue at present is public employee unions. New Governor Scott Walker and Republican legislators want to change the collective bargaining rights of most public employees and require those employees to pay half of their pension costs and 12.8 percent of their health care costs. Wisconsin is facing significant budget shortfalls, and the measures are expected to save $300 million during the next two-year budget cycle. Public employees, their unions, and Democrats in the Wisconsin legislature adamantly oppose these efforts. Public employees have flooded the Wisconsin capitol building to protest; many were teachers who called in “sick” to participate. Meanwhile, stout-hearted Democratic state senators boarded a bus and fled Wisconsin so they would be beyond the jurisdiction of the Senate Sergeant at Arms. The 
It turns out that three of the five biggest spenders this election cycle are unions. According to 
e I was on the road today I heard a curious story on NPR: the 109 non-management employees of the Ohio Education Association, which is Ohio’s largest teachers union, 
The Post clearly is correct in characterizing this latest stimulus bill as a sop to teachers unions. The President and congressional Democrats want to leave a big polished apple on the teacher’s desk — and they hope to get campaign cash and votes in return.
In those days, of course, union membership in private sector jobs was much more common. (I was a union member twice — when I worked as a 
If I am right on the reasons for a decline in private sector union membership, why haven’t those same forces operated to affect public employee membership? I think there are three reasons. First, public employee jobs cannot move overseas. Second, public employee unions can directly influence the decisions of those who are going to decide their wages and benefits by lobbying and contributions to political campaigns. Third, the legislators and administrators who are making decisions about public employee wages and benefits are spending taxpayer money; they don’t need to sell more widgets or achieve greater worker productivity to justify increased wages and they don’t have to worry about competition.
