Thursday, June 07, 2012
Tuesday, June 5, 2012, will be remembered as the
beginning of the long decline of the public-sector union. It will follow, and
parallel, the shrinking of private-sector unions, now down to less than 7
percent of American workers. The abject failure of the unions to recall
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker — the first such failure in U.S. history —
marks the Icarus moment of government-union power. Wax wings melted, there’s
nowhere to go but down.
The ultimate significance of Walker’s union reforms has
been largely misunderstood. At first, the issue was curtailing outrageous union
benefits, far beyond those of the ordinary Wisconsin taxpayer. That became a
nonissue when the unions quickly realized that trying to defend the
indefensible would render them toxic for the real fight to come.
So they made the fight about the “right” to collective
bargaining, which the reforms severely curtailed. In a state as historically
progressive as Wisconsin — in 1959, it was the first to legalize the
government-worker union — they thought they could win as a matter of
ideological fealty.
But as the recall campaign progressed, the Democrats
stopped talking about bargaining rights. It was a losing issue. Walker was able
to make the case that years of corrupt union-politician back-scratching had
been bankrupting the state. And he had just enough time to demonstrate the
beneficial effects of overturning that arrangement: a huge budget deficit
closed without raising taxes, significant school-district savings from ending
cozy insider health-insurance contracts, and a modest growth in jobs.
But the real threat behind all this was that the new law
ended automatic government collection of union dues. That was the unexpressed
and politically inexpressible issue. Without the thumb of the state tilting the
scale by coerced collection, union membership became truly voluntary. Result?
Newly freed members rushed for the exits. In less than one year, AFSCME, the
second largest public-sector union in Wisconsin, has lost more than 50 percent
of its membership in the state.
It was predictable. In Indiana, where Governor Mitch
Daniels instituted by executive order a similar reform seven years ago,
government-worker unions have since lost 91 percent of their dues-paying
membership. In Wisconsin, Democratic and union bosses (a redundancy) understood
what was at stake if Walker prevailed: not benefits, not “rights,” but the very
existence of the unions.
So they fought and they lost. Repeatedly. Tuesday was
their third and last shot at reversing Walker’s reforms. In April 2011, they
ran a candidate for chief justice of the state supreme court who was widely
expected to strike down the law. She lost.
In July and August 2011, they ran recall elections of
state senators, needing three to reclaim Democratic — i.e., union — control.
They failed. (The likely flipping of one Senate seat to the Democrats on June 5
is insignificant. The senate is not in session and won’t be until after yet
another round of elections in November.)
And then, Tuesday, their Waterloo. Walker defeated their
gubernatorial candidate by a wider margin than he had two years ago.
The unions’ defeat marks a historical inflection point.
They set out to make an example of Walker. He succeeded in making an example of
them as a classic case of reactionary liberalism. An institution founded to
protect its members grew in size, wealth, power, and arrogance. A half-century
later these unions were exercising essential control of everything from wages
to work rules in the running of government — something that, in a system of
republican governance, is properly the sovereign province of the citizenry.
Why did the unions lose? Because Norma Rae nostalgia is
not enough, and it hardly applied to government workers living better than the
average taxpayer who supports them.
And because of the rise of a new constitutional
conservatism — committed to limited government and a more robust civil society
— of the kind that swept away Democrats in the 2010 midterm shellacking.
Most important, however, because in the end reality
prevails. As economist Herb Stein once put it: Something that can’t go on,
won’t. These public-sector unions, acting, as FDR had feared, with an inherent
conflict of interest regarding their own duties, were devouring the institution
they were supposed to serve, rendering state government as economically
unsustainable as the collapsing entitlement states of southern Europe.
It couldn’t go on. Now it won’t. All that was missing was
a political leader willing to risk his career to make it stop. Because, time
being infinite, even the inevitable doesn’t happen on its own.
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