Beaten down worked up, p.24
Beaten Down, Worked Up, page 24
Walker issued a stern warning to Wisconsin’s unions: unless Act 10 was passed, he would be forced to lay off six thousand state workers. “I’m just trying to balance my budget,” he said. “To those who say why didn’t I negotiate on this? I don’t have anything to negotiate with. We don’t have anything to give. Like practically every other state in the country, we’re broke.”
Democratic lawmakers, labor leaders, and newspaper fact-checkers rejected Walker’s claim. “Wisconsin can balance its budget. We’ve actually dealt with more serious shortfalls,” said Mark Pocan, a Democratic assemblyman during the Act 10 battle and former co-chair of the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee. “This isn’t about revenue and spending. This is about finding an excuse to take away collective bargaining rights and destroy unions as a political power.” The shortfall Walker faced was smaller than one faced by his predecessor, Jim Doyle, a Democrat, who sorted it out with assistance from the state employee unions that included wage freezes and unpaid furlough days.
Walker and many Republicans condemned some of their adversaries’ tactics. Some protesters likened Walker to Hitler, and some at the State Capitol blocked legislators from getting to their offices and cars, forcing many to trudge through an underground tunnel. In La Crosse, Wisconsin, several demonstrators surrounded Walker’s car, rocked it, and beat on its windows. Walker said that he and his family received anonymous death threats.
Notwithstanding their colossal protests, Wisconsin’s unions realized that it would be hard to block Walker’s plan because Republicans had such large majorities in the state senate and assembly. Marty Beil, the president of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, a branch of AFSCME, announced that the public-sector unions, “to help bring our state’s budget into balance,” would reluctantly accept the painful concessions that Walker was demanding on pensions and health. But Beil rejected Walker’s plan to eviscerate unions, declaring, “We will not be denied our God-given right to join a real union….We will not be denied our rights to collectively bargain.”
The Democrats saw only one way to stop Walker: deny the Republicans the quorum needed. To that end, fourteen Democratic senators fled to northern Illinois—beyond the reach of the state troopers that GOP leaders had dispatched to haul them back to Madison. The “Wisconsin Fourteen” stayed away for twenty-one days, but the Republicans ultimately outmaneuvered them by stripping budget provisions from the antiunion bill, thereby reducing the quorum requirements. In that way, Walker won passage of Act 10.
Walker hailed it as a great achievement. Three years after Act 10 was passed, Walker told me in an interview, “The reforms have done exceptionally well in terms of the financial benefits they provided. Many people don’t fully realize that the lasting reform of Act 10 is it helps communities balance their budget.”
Walker pointed to what happened in West Bend, a community of thirty-one thousand north of Milwaukee. Before Act 10, its school district had reduced course offerings and increased class sizes. But after Act 10, the district saved $250,000 a year by revamping its health plan and raising the retirement age for teachers. “We couldn’t negotiate or maneuver around that when there was [collective] bargaining,” said Ted Neitzke, the district’s superintendent. “We’ve been able to shift money out of the health plan back into the classroom.” (Some city and county officials complained, however, that Walker’s sharp cuts in state revenue sharing to their communities more than offset the labor cost savings stemming from Act 10.)
Everyone agreed that Act 10 was a huge smackdown of labor. James R. Scott, the Walker-appointed chairman of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, said, “As a result of Act 10, the advantages that labor held have been diminished. It’s fair to say that employers have the upper hand now.” William Powell Jones, who was a history professor at the University of Wisconsin during the battle over Act 10, was blunter about the law’s consequences. “I don’t see how unions can survive,” he said. “This bill is designed to make it almost impossible to operate a union.”
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If Scott Walker had a mentor or a sponsor, it was Michael Grebe. Grebe was chairman of Walker’s gubernatorial campaign committee and president of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a Milwaukee-based foundation with an endowment of over $800 million that has been described as an “ideological behemoth” on behalf of conservative causes. Grebe, a West Point graduate, Vietnam veteran, and former general counsel to the Republican National Committee, also headed Walker’s gubernatorial transition committee, helping select his cabinet. Grebe and his foundation played a pivotal role in laying the groundwork for Act 10. Before Walker’s election, the Bradley Foundation gave $2 million to the Madison-based, free-market MacIver Institute and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. Both vigorously oppose public-sector unions, and both gave valuable policy advice to Walker. Bradley also gave $520,000 to the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a Koch brothers affiliate that championed Act 10.
The political action committee at Koch Industries, the brothers’ mammoth conglomerate, was the second-biggest donor to Walker’s gubernatorial campaign. That PAC also gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which spent heavily to help elect Walker. John Menard Jr., Wisconsin’s richest man, famously antiunion, donated $1.5 million to the Wisconsin Club for Growth, a PAC that also spent generously to elect Walker. (For many years, Menard’s chain of home-improvement stores had an illegal policy of refusing to hire anyone who had ever been in a labor union.)
In her important book Dark Money, Jane Mayer wrote that Walker won “on a wave of dark money, ready to implement policies [that contributors] had painstakingly incubated in conservative nonprofits for decades.” Mayer added that the Bradley Foundation “provided the playbook for many of Walker’s policies.”
Soon after Walker won, the MacIver Institute posted an op-ed that urged him to launch a frontal assault on public-sector unions. The article, by Brian Fraley, a MacIver senior fellow, said that “public employee unions skew the labor-management equation through their political muscle” and obtain better wages and benefits “at the expense of the taxpaying public.” Fraley complained that public-sector unions gained “power through taxpayer paid union dues, which in turn are used to leverage policies that lead to the increase in the size, scope, and cost of government, which means more public employee union members.”
Some of Act 10’s antiunion provisions were proposed by the Bradley-funded Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. James R. Klauser, the institute’s chairman, said, “Some people in the Walker campaign were scratching their heads about how to deal with union health and pension costs, and we supplied the ideas.”
Another billionaire Walker backer was Diane Hendricks, co-founder of ABC Supply, the nation’s largest roofing wholesaler. In 2011, several weeks after Walker was inaugurated, Hendricks met with him and asked, “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions?” Forgetting that he was in front of a video camera, Walker responded, “We’re going to start in a couple weeks,” as part of his budget bill. “The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public-employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.” Walker said he wanted to work with private-sector unions and would never let a right-to-work law get to his desk—private-sector unions detest such laws. Despite that vow, Walker, pressed by conservative donors, signed a right-to-work bill in 2015.
Walker’s antiunion crusade caused many conservatives to rally behind him when unions put a recall vote on the ballot in 2012. Hendricks gave $500,000 to Walker’s anti-recall effort (and later $5 million to a super PAC backing his unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign). The casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson gave $250,000 to fight the recall, and so did Dick DeVos, a Michigan billionaire married to Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s secretary of education. The Texas billionaire Bob Perry, who bankrolled the deceitful “Swift Boat” attacks against John Kerry in 2004, gave Walker $500,000. In all, Walker raised over $30 million, more than seven times what the pro-recall forces raised. Walker defeated the recall with 53 percent of the vote.
Walker won the governorship in November 2010 as part of a wave election for Republicans at the state level—they won control of the governor’s mansion and the state legislature in Wisconsin and twelve other states where there had been divided government. It soon became clear that GOP lawmakers and their financial backers were spoiling to launch an offensive against public-sector unions, and Walker led the way. In a candid moment, he admitted that Act 10 was “pushing the envelope” with its antiunion tactics. He added, “I hope I’m [an] inspiration” for others.
Wisconsin’s Act 10 was the culmination of decades of GOP and conservative anger at public-sector unions. While private-sector unions had taken a drubbing, public-sector unions were going strong, with 37 percent of government employees in unions. For GOP lawmakers and conservative donors, attacking government unions was the key to further undermining labor. For them, it would be a trifecta: it would weaken a financial pillar of the Democrats, undercut a vocal supporter of “big government,” and hobble those unions’ ability to win pay increases that often lead to higher taxes.
Critics of public-sector unions often pointed to the hefty pensions received by some government employees, like the yearly pensions of over $100,000 for many Suffolk County, New York, police and California Highway Patrol retirees. Critics complained that such generous pensions led to problems like the $130 billion shortfall in the State of Illinois’s public-employee pension plan. Conservative think tanks, GOP politicians, and many parents (including some Democrats) also criticized teachers’ unions for often using tenure protections to delay or prevent the firing of teachers who did a poor job educating children or had been charged with misbehavior.
At the time Walker was first elected governor, many private-sector workers in Wisconsin were reeling from layoffs due to recession and factory shutdowns, with many losing their health coverage and seeing their pensions endangered. A good number of them resented that government workers contributed nothing toward their pensions. As Leah Lipska said, Walker tapped into that by repeatedly attacking government employees as the “haves.” At a time when many Wisconsinites were hurting economically, Dave Weiland, a teacher in Oconomowoc, said public-sector unions were stuck in a mind-set from a more generous era. “The gravy train was running, and they didn’t see the curve,” Weiland said. (A 2012 study by three business school professors found that overall compensation for state and local public employees was between 1 and 5.6 percent less than for comparable private-sector employees, depending on which data set was used.)
Days after Walker unveiled Act 10, Republican lawmakers in Tennessee and Idaho moved to strip public school teachers of their bargaining rights, while Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels, proposed limiting teachers’ bargaining to just wages and benefits. The Ohio state legislature and Governor John Kasich enacted a bill even more far-reaching than Wisconsin’s, stripping all government employees, including police and firefighters, of their ability to bargain. (Because the Ohio Constitution, unlike Wisconsin’s, allows ballot initiatives to repeal laws, Ohio’s unions put a repeal measure on the ballot. In November 2011, Ohioans voted by 62 percent to 38 percent to erase their state’s antiunion, anti-bargaining law.) In February 2017, Iowa lawmakers enacted a far-reaching antiunion law much like Act 10.
Grover Norquist, the antitax crusader, said that as a result of Act 10, 135,000 government workers in Wisconsin stopped paying union dues. He celebrated that this had cut union revenues by an estimated $135 million a year. Noting that Republican governors in Kentucky and Missouri hoped to enact similar legislation, Norquist predicted, “If Act 10 is enacted in a dozen more states, the modern Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics. It’s that big a deal.”
Public-sector unions have faced attacks not just in Republican-led states but also in the Supreme Court, which dealt them a severe blow in a 2018 ruling. In that case, Janus v. AFSCME, Mark Janus, an Illinois child support worker, asked the justices to ban any requirement that public employees pay fees to the unions that bargain for them. By a 5–4 vote, the Court ruled that any such requirement violates government employees’ First Amendment rights because the union might espouse positions—like preserving tenure or seniority protections—that a worker disagrees with. The Court struck down an Illinois law that required government workers to pay unions “their proportionate share of the costs of the collective bargaining process” and “contract administration.” At the time, twenty-two states had laws requiring public employees to pay such fees, known as “agency fees” or “fair share fees.”
In an op-ed, Janus explained his position:
Government unions have pushed for government spending that made the state’s fiscal situation worse. How is that good for the people of the state? Or, for that matter, my fellow union members who face the threat of layoffs or their pension funds someday running dry? The union voice is not my voice. The union’s fight is not my fight. But a piece of my paycheck every week still goes to the union.
(Later, when interviewed by several journalists, Janus had a kinder take, saying, “I’m not anti-union….Collective bargaining is beneficial to people and workers.”) Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which helped argue Janus’s case, called the ruling “a landmark victory for rights of public-sector employees coast-to-coast that will free” them “from mandatory union payments.”
Labor unions attacked the Janus decision, worried that it would encourage many public employees to become “free riders” who would receive union benefits without paying for them. Labor experts predicted that between 10 and 30 percent of government employees would opt out of paying union fees. In the Court’s majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito mocked the “free rider” notion, writing that Janus “is not a free rider on a bus headed for a destination that he wishes to reach but is more like a person shanghaied for an unwanted voyage.” (The Court overturned its unanimous forty-one-year-old Abood ruling that upheld laws requiring government workers to pay union fees; the Abood court viewed those laws as a way to promote labor peace and enable unions to get monetary support from all of the workers they represented.)
Dissenting in Janus, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the majority decision “wreaks havoc” on thousands of union contracts nationwide. She slammed the majority as “black-robed rulers” who were “overriding citizens’ choices” and “weaponizing the First Amendment, in a way that unleashes judges, now and in the future, to intervene in economic and regulatory policy.” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), said Janus wasn’t “a case brought by individuals trying to have a voice, it’s a case brought by wealthy forces to eliminate worker voice and power.”
Ten minutes after the Court issued its ruling, President Trump tweeted, “Big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!” Politico wrote that public-sector unions were “keeping the labor movement afloat,” but “now the Supreme Court just took a sledgehammer to that pillar.” A who’s who of conservative groups and billionaires had helped underwrite the case, hoping it would severely weaken unions’ finances. The funders included the Koch network, the Bradley Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and Richard Uihlein, a right-wing Illinois industrialist.
Even before Janus was decided, public-sector unions were moving to counteract the anticipated result. They reached out to hundreds of thousands of members to urge them to recommit to their union and to paying dues. At the time Janus was decided, the AFT said 530,000 members had recommitted to the union. Nonetheless, the National Education Association predicted it would lose about 340,000 of its 3 million members.
Days after the ruling, a right-wing nonprofit, the Freedom Foundation, said it would send eighty canvassers to knock on government employees’ doors in three union strongholds—California, Oregon, and Washington—to urge those workers to quit their unions and stop paying dues. The group, funded by a billionaire-backed conservative network, said it hoped its campaign would reduce union ranks in those states by 127,000 members. The Freedom Foundation’s CEO, Tom McCabe, once wrote a fund-raising letter saying it had a “proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions,” and its Oregon coordinator said, “Our No. 1 stated focus is to defund the political left.”
Bob Schoonover, who works as a heavy equipment mechanic for the City of Los Angeles and heads an SEIU local there, condemned these efforts. “They’re really not advocating for the employees at all—they’re advocating for unions to lose their power,” he said. “They want to silence the working class. It just so happens that unions are the ones that stick up for the working class.”
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Few people know the problems government employee unions face better than Paul Spink, a thirty-nine-year-old Milwaukee resident who looks like a rugby player, with his reddish-brown beard and burly frame. In 2015, Spink was elected president of AFSCME’s beleaguered statewide operations in Wisconsin largely because he is so good at explaining what public-sector unions need to do to win public support and beat back conservatives’ attacks. In addition to his union post, Spink holds a full-time state job inspecting children’s day-care centers across Wisconsin to ensure that they’re safe and comply with the law.
Spink and his union face a mountain of problems. Since 2011, AFSCME’s membership in Wisconsin (which includes Leah Lipska’s local) has plunged from sixty-three thousand to below twenty thousand statewide, and its budget has fallen by around 75 percent. Many government workers keep asking why they should belong to a union and pay dues when public-employee unions can hardly bargain anymore in Wisconsin.
