Wisconsin Supreme Court race is a union money grab versus sanity
Wisconsin’s early spring elections for its Supreme Court were historically sleepy affairs, with minimal implications outside the Badger State.Not this year.While the state’s abortion law and its congressional redistricting process are getting attention, next Tuesday’s ostensibly nonpartisan election between Democrat Susan Crawford and Republican Brad Schimel is shaping up to be a belated referendum on Act 10, the sweeping cost-saving reforms enacted under Gov.Scott Walker in 2011.A socialist hotbed in the early 20th century, Wisconsin in 1959 was the first state to pass a law allowing public-sector collective bargaining — that is, the unionization of government employees.In the private sector, a labor union can only demand what a company is able to pay.
Insist on too much, and prices risk going higher than customers are willing to spend.But that normal balance doesn’t exist in government, where officials almost reflexively pass these costs on to taxpayers.The problem with that approach, to borrow from Margaret Thatcher, is that officials in Madison eventually ran out of other people’s money.The Global Financial Crisis and the Great Recession rattled state and local finances.
Tax receipts fell and pension obligations grew.Walker tackled the resultant multibillion-dollar budget gap in his first months with Act 10.It overhauled the collective bargaining process under which state and local governments negotiate with their employee unions (a dynamic neatly described by my colleague Daniel DiSalvo as “government against itself”).Act 10 made unions collect their own dues instead of having government offices deduct them from employee paychecks.It put the onus on the unions to periodically win re-election in secret ballots, since most workers had never had a say on whether to be represented by a union.And it limited what terms and conditions of employment, like the size of raises, could be controlled by union contracts instead of directly by the peop...