WASHINGTON — Let’s be clear: Whatever fiscal problems Wisconsin is — or is not — facing at the moment, they’re not caused by labor unions. That’s also true for other states. There was no sharp rise in collective bargaining in 2006 and 2007, no major reforms of labor laws, no dramatic change in how unions organize. And yet, state budgets collapsed.
Revenues plummeted. Taxes had to go up, and spending had to go down. Blame the banks. Blame global capital flows. Blame lax regulation of Wall Street. Blame homebuyers or sellers. But don’t blame unions. Not for this recession.
Of course, the fact that public- employee pensions didn’t cause a meltdown at Lehman Brothers doesn’t mean they’re not stressing state budgets. But the buildup of global capital that overheated the U.S. housing sector and got packaged into products that brought down Wall Street, paralyzing the economy, throwing millions out of work, and destroying the revenues from state income and sales taxes even as state residents needed more social services? The answer to that is not to end collective bargaining for public employees. A plus B plus C does not equal what Gov. Scott Walker is attempting in Wisconsin.
In fact, it particularly doesn’t work for what Walker is attempting in Wisconsin. The Badger State was actually in pretty good shape. It was supposed to end this budget cycle with about $120 million in the bank. Instead, it’s facing a deficit. Why?
The governor signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health care policy experiment that lowers tax revenues. The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit.
Public employees aren’t being asked to make a one-time payment into the state’s coffers. Rather, Walker is proposing to sharply curtail their right to bargain collectively. A cyclical downturn that isn’t their fault, plus an unexpected reversal in Wisconsin’s budget picture that wasn’t their doing, is being used to permanently end their ability to sit across from their employer and negotiate.
That’s how you keep a crisis from going to waste: You take a complicated problem that requires the apparent need for bold action and use it to achieve a longtime ideological objective. In this case, permanently weakening public-employee unions, a group much-loathed by Republicans.
If you read Walker’s State of the State address, you can watch him hide what he’s doing.
“Our upcoming budget is built on the premise that we must right size our government,” he said. “That means reforming public employee benefits — as well as reforming entitlement programs and reforming the state’s relationship with local governments.” Not a word on ending collective bargaining for benefits.
If all Walker was doing was reforming public employee benefits, I’d have little problem with it.
There’s too much deferred compensation in public employee packages, and it’s true that situations change and unsustainable commitments require reforms.
But that’s not what Walker is doing. He’s attacking the right to bargain collectively — which is to say, he’s attacking the very foundation of labor unions, and of worker power — and using an economic crisis unions didn’t cause, and a budget reversal that Walker himself helped create, to justify it.
And it’s not as if public employees aren’t hurting. Private jobs are coming back, but state and local jobs are still being lost.
Public-employee unions are on the mat.
Walker is trying to make sure they don’t get back up.
