Let's Set the Record Straight on the Wisconsin Labor Protests

Woodstock, GA

The Wisconsin labor protests have been attracting a lot of attention since they started a few weeks ago. Briefly, Governor Walker, facing a budget deficit of about $140 million, proposed legislation shifting the cost of some state employees’ fringe benefits – health insurance and pension plan contributions – from the state to those employees. He also proposed eliminating those employees’ collective bargaining rights. Note that this didn’t affect all unionized state employees – the law enforcement and firefighters unions were exempted. Coincidentally, those unions supported Walker’s bid for election in 2010.

The GOP and T-Party folks have successfully muddied the waters here. Walker's bill isn't about having the union members "contribute a little more" to their benefits, it's about abrogating a contract (called "welshing" where I come from) and reducing the status of the workers from equals in an employment arrangement to little more than serfs.

In every employment arrangement, some of the compensation is benefits and deferred compensation (retirement arrangement - pension or savings). Wisconsin already signed a contract to pay its workers X amount of dollars plus y amount of fringes and a z amount of pension contributions. The total compensation is X+Y+Z. “Shifting costs” from the employer to the employee here means reducing the total compensation promised. When it’s done unilaterally, as Walker’s done, it’s called “welshing.”

Any employer with integrity would have called for an emergency renegotiation of the contract. Instead, Walker proposes, in effect, to impose a cut in compensation on the state's workers (except, apparently, for those who supported his election).

This fellow has a severe anti-union bias, apparently driven by ideological motivations, but not so much so that he’s blinded to the possibilities of exploiting unions for his own purposes - note how he exempts from his draconian measures those unions that supported him! Can you say hypocrisy?

As to depriving the unions of their collective bargaining rights, anyone who thinks that's a measure designed to close the current budget gap, or prevent next year's projected gap, is a fool. Collective bargaining is always a two-way street, and a very useful tool for management to discern and address the issues really important to its workers.

No, eliminating bargaining rights is Governor Walker's admission that the management of Wisconsin – appointed by him to posts of high responsibility and authority – can’t handle this important job - that even when supervised by the Governor's office and advised of budget constraints, negotiators for the state and its agencies can be counted on to give away the store every time.

So in a classic GOP one-size-fits-all strategy, instead of training Wisconsin's managers in negotiating and implementing an integrated approach to the next round of collective bargaining with state employees, he's attempting simply to strip them of their right to bargain over the terms and conditions of their employment. Walker claims to be seeking to enhance the “flexibility” of state departments. Based on what we’ve seen so far, I think we can look forward, in the near future, to such “flexible” arrangements as hiring licensed electricians and plumbers at janitors’ pay rates, and then assigning them to do electrical and plumbing work. Another “flexible” response: when a worker files a grievance, the grievance procedure itself might be cancelled in the interest of saving money, since it takes time from both the worker, the manager, and of course the in-shop union representative.

More and more, Walker's sounding like a petty tyrant. It's no surprise that the Wisconsin protests are happening at the same time as the Libyan protests. Any day now, I expect to hear Walker proclaiming that the people really love him.