Opinion | ‘The Right Has a Greater Appreciation of Labor’s Role Than We Do’

Jarrett Skorup, director of communications at the Mackinac Center, one of many state-based conservative think tanks that have led anti-union drives across the country, wrote in 2017 on the center’s website:

The Michigan branch of the Service Employees International Union representing home health care workers was riding high. It had 55,000 members, brought in $22 million annually and was able to spend nearly $3.5 million on politics. Then it all came crashing down. Five years later, the union is a shell of its former self. Membership plunged to under 10,000. Revenue is less than one-third what it was at its peak. Political spending bottomed out at less than 5 percent of what it once was.

The opening slide in a PowerPoint presentation to Democratic and liberal donors by Blue Compass Strategies, a pro-labor consulting group, has the headline “The Right Has A Greater Appreciation Of Labor’s Role Than We Do” over a picture of Scott Walker signing Act 10 in 2011.

While unions are taking a financial beating, the Blue Compass presentation documents the surge in contributions in the first half of this decade to state-level conservative groups — many of them linked to the conservative State Policy Network — that back right-to-work and other laws that constrain unions.

From 2010 to 2015, for example, Blue Compass found, revenues rising from $1.8 million in 2010 to $5.6 million 2015 at the Illinois Policy Center; from $818,355 to $1.7 million at the Buckeye Institute in Ohio; from $440,244 to $1.9 million at the Washington Policy Center in Seattle. Revenues at the Mackinac Center grew from $3.4 million to $6.3 million over this same period. Cash flow to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty grew from $511,939 in 2011 to $3 million in 2015.

One of the better things to happen for Democrats, organized labor and public employee unions in particular, is that Grover Norquist’s call for 10 states to follow Scott Walker’s lead in Wisconsin and enact a version of Act 10 has not materialized.

One of the key elements of Act 10 is that it uses the savings in reduced government employee pay and benefits to restructure the financing of state and local governments. As a result, repealing the Act would set in motion a chain reaction of politically damaging tax hikes.

Christian Schneider, a conservative columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, delighted in telling readers that

Even if they went ahead with repealing the law, Democrats would have to deal with the effects of reversing the myriad proposals under Act 10’s umbrella. One of Walker’s primary initiatives was to require state and local employees to start paying towards their pension and health care benefits, which saved both levels of government money. This allowed him to reduce aid to local governments and school districts, knowing they would be able to replenish those funds by having to pay less for employee benefits.

If Democrats reinstate Wisconsin as a union utopia and teachers and local government employees once again start to collectively bargain, it will certainly increase the cost of providing services, and thus push property taxes significantly upward. That is, of course, unless the Democratic candidates want to move back to a system in which the state provides aid to local governments and school districts to subsidize these benefits. If that is the case, Democrats should be willing to provide examples of which state taxes they would raise to provide the billions of dollars it would take to restore this aid model.

Tony Evers, the newly elected Democratic governor of Wisconsin, included a series of pro-labor provisions in his first budget: a call for the repeal of right-to-work laws, a $15 minimum wage on government projects and restoration of the state prevailing wage law. He did not, however, include repeal of Act 10.

Marquette University Law School polled Wisconsin voters on Act 10 seven times between 2012 and 2018. In the first five, by small margins of 2 to 7 points, pluralities averaging 48.5 percent preferred to keep the law on the books, compared with 43 percent for repeal. In the two most recent surveys, however, a plurality, 44.5 percent, supported repeal while 43 percent backed retention.