John Kasich and Scott Walker, the Republican governors of Ohio and Wisconsin, have actively backed legislation that would limit the scope for which public sector unions could collectively negotiate. In doing so, they have summoned the full force and breadth of the political left in opposition.The two state executives are fiscal conservatives trying to close budget shortfalls. To this end, they have proposed a path, through legislation, that attempts to mimic what Indiana’s Republican Governor Mitch Daniels accomplished, with little oppositional outrage, in the first half of the last decade.
Facing a $600 million deficit, Daniels, upon being sworn in, issued an executive order which ended the state employees’ ability to collectively bargain. This put in motion a series of events that allowed Indiana’s coffers to amass a $370 surplus.
Arguing the GOP’s position, Daniels stated that public workers “are better paid than the taxpayers who pay their salary. When you add much more generous benefits and much more generous pensions on top, the gap widens; and then there’s near total job security.”
Opponents to public sector unions stress that while private sector unions collectively negotiate for a greater portion of the profits they produced against self-interested management, public sector unions fight for more and more tax payer dollars. They describe a sort of racket in which the unions collect worker dues, campaign to elect Democrats, who, via quid pro quo, reward the unions with more generous compensation.
Savings, they argue, come from the flexibility that would allow public employers to more easily adjust their labor force. Thus, when an inevitable cyclical contraction occurs in the economy, the state wouldn’t have to choose between deficit spending or blindly laying off its workforce.
Implementing a merit retention system, a worst go first scheme, would leave the remaining personnel better and more talented than the status quo: the union intractable “Last hired, first fired” rule.
The Republican attacks on public sector unions have irradiated the true Citadel of American Progressivism. Unions are the backbone of the Democratic Party, the loyal stalwarts of the left. Even if they don’t stand up fully for a Democratic candidate, they rarely stray; an oft-thought GOP pocket piece, Wall Street, on the other hand, contributed more money to Obama in ’08.
So the bills quickly galvanized the public sector unions in opposition to reform, filling the statehouses at Columbus and Madison with unionists.
The intellectual argument against Ohio’s anti-union bill, Senate Bill 5 (SB5), is led, in part, by protesting university professors.
John T. McNay, President of the American Association of University Professors-University of Cincinnati, submits that SB5 “will undermine the quality of work performed for the Ohio public and almost certainly result in massive full-time job losses.” McNay predicts that the passage of the bill will lead to lower salaries, benefits, and working conditions. As Ohio is not in a vacuum, McNay says its universities will lose their best staff, as they’ll choose to go out-of-state , thereby turning the state’s universities “into third-rate institutions.”
Unionists claim that Republicans are trying to balance the budget on the backs of state workers. Indeed, if the Ohio and Wisconsin state governments made their whole workforce redundant, the governors would have deep deficit reduction still ahead of them.
A Gallup poll released February 23 found that 61 percent of Americans would not want similar legislation in their state, an indication, the left hopes, that the American people don’t like collective bargaining being taken away from unions.
It is yet unknown if the GOP will tell the opposition what they had so often heard: elections have consequences.