Wisconsin Governor Tries To Trample State Workers

[This post is updated with new commentary]
As dictators in the Middle East are giving in to grass-roots demonstrations and granting their citizens broader civil liberties, U.S. politicians are trying to rob public-sector employees of basic labor rights. Thousands of state workers are demonstrating in Madison, Wisconsin, protesting proposed legislation that would deny workers the ability to negotiate their benefits.

Governor Scott Walker's motives are transparent -- to make the state highly business-friendly. During his short time in office, he has already granted tax benefits to businesses, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But using tough financial times as a cover story for denying unions some of their basic rights falls somewhere between hypocritical and disingenuous.

There is an excellent analysis of the battle in The New York Times today, provided by Wisconsin native Tobin Harshaw.

The demonstrations are not about the money involved. I've seen Wisconsin union leaders on television saying they are willing to make the higher contributions to their own health care and pensions. Truth be told, the Wisconsin workers have a pretty good deal, and maybe they should be paying more in, but you have to remember that they didn't steal their benefits -- they got them in the give-and-take of past contract negotiations. (I've written about state pensions lately.)

Instead the workers are protesting what amounts to the state going back on its word, and taking away the rights to negotiate for benefits. Like their pay and benefits, the unions didn't steal these rights -- they won them in negotiations years ago, and gave up something to get them.

The governor also wants to marginalize the unions by disallowing deductions of due from paychecks and renegotiating every contract every year.

Governor Walker says these steps have to be taken because the state is "broke." It's not, says The Nation, via The New York Times:

The Fiscal Bureau of Wisconsin just said in January that it will end this year with a $123 million surplus. So the fact of the matter is that this is not being done because of a lack of money.

I've seen Governor Walker on television offering a justification for taking away these basic rights. It's short on specifics, but his message is that state workers make more money that private sector workers and therefore their pay and benefits need to be cut. The need to take away the bargaining rights for benefits is just slipped in there as a "have to." Fast-forward a few years, and I can imagine the private employers will try similar gambits to strip their unions of the ability to negotiate benefits. I guess the tax breaks aren't enough.

In the Times, Tobin Harshaw notes that a similar bill has been introduced in Ohio, and that in Indiana such bargaining rights were taken away by a governor's fiat.

Update: Paul Krugman, Nobel-prize winning economist and columnist for The New York Times, makes these observations on President's Day:

But Mr. Walker isn't interested in making a deal. Partly that's because he doesn't want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly,...he wants to end workers' ability to bargain.

Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis... [And] contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there's not much room for further pay squeezes.

So it's not about the budget; it's about the power.