Jay Ambrose, a columnist syndicated by McClatchy-Tribune News Service, is still spreading around the goofball conservative meme that disempowering public employee unions is the key to economic prosperty and getting things done. Following on the heels of the November elections, Ambrose unaccountably cited Wisconsin and its experience under recently re-elected Republican Gov. Scott Walker as the prime example of this approach.
You see, according to Ambrose, gutting public employee unions is the way to (as a headline over the Ambrose column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it) "save the future." But we might borrow a line from an old "Firesign Theatre" comedy routine to explain what's really going on, namely, a Republican march that's "Forward, into the past!" Trouble is, the nation has been there and done that, and it proved so awful as to lead to the very creation of the American labor movement. As it will again, if Ambrose's kind of thinking persists.
His column touting Walker's supposed successes beyond mere re-election relies mostly on the conservative echo chamber's nonsensical, fact-free arguments, spread widely across Wisconsin in the form of simplistic TV campaign ads purchased by mostly out-of-state dark money. It was another installment of the GOP/Walker bamboozlapooza: What's good for workers is sometimes bad for the economy, so cutting worker pay and benefits helps ... the workers! Trickle down, or something.
In paragraph one, Ambrose summarizes his own take on this, and gets it all very, very wrong:
"Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, took on public employee unions about to sink the state and reduced their bullying powers sufficiently to save the government billions and help rejuvenate a tepid economy."
Except for the spelling of Walker's name and his title, so much is objectively erroneous within that one sentence that by necessity it would take many sentences to fully sort out the truth -- which of course is what obfucastory Republican rhetoricians and their scribing allies rely upon to win hearts if not minds. Consider:
The Wisconsin public employee unions weren't in 2010 "about to sink the state," they were just patiently waiting for lawmakers to approve previously negotiated collective bargaining agreements. Then came Walker, who hadn't even yet taken office, but who had campaigned on a meme (more about which later) that Wisconsin was "broke." Walker demanded that the sitting governor and state legislature withhold contract approvals until he could take over and (Walker didn't reveal this right away) push his measure ending most such bargaining.
The unions promptly responded to Walker's declaration that the state was "broke" by agreeing to downward adjustments in those already agreed-upon salaries and benefits. Walker ignored them, illegally shirking his duty to bargain faithfully during the many-months interim before his law finally passed and was upheld in court. Before that, Walker had already proceeded to summarily claw back not only promised compensation but also existing levels of compensation.
Running a mostly allusional and heavily guttural campaign, Walker had worked to convince voters that that the state was broke (it wasn't), that unions were to blame (they weren't) and that everyone should join him in an agreeable round of schadenfreude and save a few bucks by getting rid of those implicitly corrupt Democrats (which for the even now legally endangered Walker would turn out to be one hell of a karmic angle). Game, set and match. But the anti-union angle came down to this:
How would you feel if you bargained hard over the price of a new car, finally bought it in what you considered a fair but tough deal, and then a month later discovered that a charge had appeared on your credit card from the car dealership, taking an extra 12 percent over the agreed-upon price? And when you demanded an explanation, the salesman explained that the dealership was broke and needed the extra money? Worse, what if you still later found out the dealership wasn't broke after all?
By way of analogy, that's what Walker did to most of the public employee unions in Wisconsin. And guys like Ambrose are still singing his praises, as Walker prepares for an apparent run at the presidency. Tell you what: I'd rather persist with Walker as my governor, bad as he's been, than inflict Walker upon the entire nation. I and many other Wisconsin reisdents will make that terrible sacrifice for you. But you, in turn, simply can't let that happen. This politician is a train wreck camouflaged inside an empty suit.
Much more below the orange puff of back-room cigar smoke.
In his post-election column, Ambrose went on blithely, slapping unions for their "bullying powers," when in fact -- in another major case of Republican projection -- it was Gov. Walker who. in violation of labor laws that conservative judges were only too happy to ignore, bullied the unions by refusing to bargain with them, even when the unions expressed willingness to sit back down and work out concessions, on the surface accepting his specious claim that the state was broke. In fact, previous governors of both parties had faced similar deficits and resolved them without gutting public education spending or fileting labor unions.
Nor should we forget that the "billions" Walker saved, according to Ambrose, came right out of public employee pocket books. Moreover, the move didn't as Ambrose claims "help rejuvenate a tepid economy," it helped worsen matters. Objectively so, if you compare job growth when Walker took office and that same growth one year or even two or four years after his policies kicked in. Not even close, despite the previous governor's more successful battle with the national and international Great Recession.
In fact, Wisconsin's economic performance to this day continues to lag other midwestern states and much of the US overall. But Ambrose is happy to repeat the conservative echo chamber meme that Walker saved the state. Arguably, Walker's policies actually wrecked it, by imposing a new, cold-hearted, and oligarchical political order. And that seems to have been a deliberate political and not just ideological move; fear-mongering Republicans these days only succeed insofar as they are able to convince voters that the apocalypse is just around the corner and that the GOP had nothing to do with bringing it on.
After all, those Walker-driven wage cuts and noticeable declines in overall public employment created a new hole in the state's economy, as state and local government workers in turn reduced family spending in local economies, and as -- at unprecedented levels -- they began retiring early rather than work in the relatively lawless new government workplace, deprived not just of formal grievance procedures but many civil service rules, too.
But if he persists in arguing that at least Walker saved the state's economy, how does columnist Ambrose explain the looming multi-billion-dollar deficit confronting Walker in the coming year -- a projected deficit that, if measured in the same way, could exceed the deficit Walker cited when in 2010 he said the state was "broke"? Were all those terrible cuts in programs and compensation for naught? It surely looks that way, at least to minds that habitually rely on logic.
Walker laid waste to one of the nation's more efficient state governments, and now he really does have something to sing about. Which apparently is just the way he likes it. In that political concert he is accompanied by two other Wisconsin politicians who believe social darwinism is a useful prescription: Rep. Paul Ryan, about to take over as House Ways and Means Committee chair, and who would destroy the social safety net in order to save it; and Sen. Ron Johnson, who is poised to do the same thing to the US Postal Service. Johnson is about to assume chairmanship of the Senate committee that deals with federal employees, themselves already beset with lagging compensation and morale problems. They ain't seen nothing, yet, from these D.C. Republican vulcanizers.
Meanwhile, back in the Midwest, Walker and his GOP minions are again making sotto voce noises about reforming the Wisconsin public pension system, which is not only in balance, but the top-rated such fund in the nation. Apparently, however, it's real value is as another fat, employee cash cow ripe for the plucking. Whether it's in good fiscal shape or not, however, the bigger issue is that the pension system is simply a bad idea, according to GOP ideology, because that money should instead be invested by employees in the ever-so safe stock market -- you know, the one that all but crashed nearly seven years ago. Oh, and let's tinker some more with the Wisconsin state employee health insurance plan, too. Because, Obamacare.
Ambrose complains about "retaliatory" efforts by unions in two elections to unseat Walker -- as if such political activity wasn't a lynchpin component of the American democratic and electoral process. Apparently, it's perfectly okay for Team Walker and well-heeled, out-of-state plutarchs like the uber-billionaire Koch brothers to go Old Testament upon organized labor, but when unions attempt the same thing in reverse, with far less cash, that's outrageous and somehow innately corrupt. "Big union bosses" trump super-big, anti-union billionaires on the GOP's scale of evil.
Ambrose's posturings notwithstanding, Walker along with some other Republicans has openly indicated that his union-busting law (2011 Wisconsin Act 10) wasn't really about reducing union power in order to balance the imaginary "broken" budget. If it had been, then you would have expected state workers to have received more than zero wage increases, relative to inflation, after Walker later declared a big (though temporary and somewhat illusionary) surplus during his re-election campaign. But no. Walker instead upwardly redistributed much of that expected surplus to wealthy special interests and businesses in the form of imbalanced tax cuts.
In truth, Act 10 was, as Walker told a billionaire supporter on camera, a "divide and conquer" move to destroy the political power of organized public employees. If you doubt that, then you must consider why Walker exempted from his union-busting law a group of public safety unions that typically support Republicans including himself. Indeed, in many Wisconsin localities, these police and fire unions represent a significant majority of public employees and a significant share of employee compensation. Yet they are still allowed to bargain collectively. So much for saving money. Walker dinged public school teachers who in many cases already earned less than cops or firefighters who didn't get dinged. Nothing political going on there, nosiree.
Nonetheless, Ambrose ponders on:
"We are on course to being saved from the seemingly immoveable power of the unions to distort democracy, devastate finances, render governmental operations less efficient and even, in some cases, cheat children out of the kind of education necessary for them to have a decent future."
No such distortions coming from far wealtheir decabillionaires or gigantic corporations, of course. Deregulate those guys! But either leash the unions or put them to sleep humanely, because sometimes they bite.
Actually, what renders government less efficient is ignoring the hard-acquired wisdom of your employees and continuing to underpay many of them relative to their counterparts in the private sector. Democracy is supposed to be about transparency, cooperation and compromise. But Walkerism admits no countervaling voices, however slight their power.
Ambrose's musings aside, public employee unions only had "seemingly immoveable power" because conservatives are so unseemly in asserting that to be true. Consider for example, labor law in general.
When all else fails, labor unions have one last, heavy-duty tool they can deploy to prod a resistant management into bargaining in good faith and coming to a mutually agreeable deal. I'm not talking about the National Labor Relations Board, which Republicans successfully have neutered. No, I refer to the seldom used but awesome right of workers to walk out, staging a strike.
Strikes are not happy events, but they are enshrined in private-sector labor law because in the early days of unions more than a century ago, striking workers were sometimes beaten up or shot to death by police or National Guardsmen. The ever-present threat of a work stoppage tends to concentrate the management bargaining mind wonderfully.
However, public employee unions don't operate under the same rules as private-sector unions. In Wisconsin, public unions were never granted power to strike. So their main bargaining tool was denied them. They often found themselves sitting at a bargaining table with representatives of the state who basically said take it or leave it.
Which is why, for years under both Democratic and Republican governors, Wisconsin public employee unions would sometimes have to bargain persistently for years to obtain a two-year contract agreement.
Indeed, at least one State of Wisconsin union bargaining session conducted before Walker's ascension to Chief Bully was so protracted that the the contract wasn't signed until after the term of that contract already had expired. The contract thus "began" after it had already ended. Some union power! And that was under a Democratic governor, whom Ambrose imagines was predisposed to give everything to the unions that they demanded.
The record of collective bargaining in Wisconsin before Walker shows anything but. Fact is, pre-Walker Republican and Democratic administrations had roughly similar success in bargaining with the unions. Thus the only hegemony around here that a million or so of us in Wisconsin can discern is the Walker administration itself.
After all, most governors and legislators of all stripes have larger constituencies than unions alone. If you're a Democratic governor with union support, you would be foolish to give everything to unions and short-change everyone else. It's a delicate balancing act, and that's how governing always should be. Unions may be imperfect, but they are wise enough to understand and respect this, if they aren't always entirely happy with the results. In democracy, give-and-take isn't a defect, it's a feature.
Republicans in the mold of Walker, however, are quite willing to give everything they can to the special interests that fuel their campaigns, while taking no prisoners otherwise. Which may be why the state economic-development agency that Walker chairs has given out noticeably more grants and loans to businesses in "red" counties of Wisconsin, even while Walker cuts aid to "blue" counties. Reward your friends, punish your enemies, and don't bother being a servant of all the people.
But Ambrose knows or sees none of that, or is at least satisfied not to share with his readers, instead asking of embattled politicians: "Do you raise taxes to the point of shriveling the lives of average citizens? Do you take the money from schools and road repair? Or do you maybe find ways to bring collective bargaining, pensions and more under control?" Well, If you're Scott Walker, the answer is this:
You cut taxes but give most of the money to the elites. You shrivel the lives of average citizens by reducing government programs that benefit them, easily outweighing what puny amounts you give them back in tax savings. You rip away a billion dollars worth of state aid from public schools and more from the state's once-vaunted university and technical school systems and wonder aloud why they're not delivering best results.
If you're Walker, you do boost spending on roads, borrowing billions and taking money from social programs to do it, but (in evident service to the interests of private road builders who funded your campaigns) you focus on building more and bigger highways, even if they appear unnecessary, while spending less on local street repairs and mass transit.
And you fund a chunk of all the above out of the pocketbooks of already stressed public employees, local and state, convincing many of them to flee civil service and even Wisconsin altogether in search of greener pastures. You thereby dumb down government, which is a nifty side benefit, since you obviously disdain the very idea of an efficient, high-functioning public sector that invests in all its citizens.
Selectively kill off public labor unions that tend to oppose your policies? Wreck public education while funding mysterous private schools that aren't nearly as accountable? Pour concrete ribbons across the state and cut support for bus systems? Dig miles-long canyons for open-pit mines? Fill in wetlands for business development? All in a few year's work for Team Walker. And the beauty part is that -- through mouthpieces like Ambrose -- they stlll get to blame any of their own misguided setbacks on the unions they've already emasculated.