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Union Workers come to D.C. to Show Support for Wisconsin

Posted Friday, February 25, 2011 in Reporting by Mikhail Zinshteyn

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  • Union Workers come to D.C. to Show Support for Wisconsin

Chanting “hey hey, ho ho, Walker’s bill has got to go,” and “two-four-six-eight, union rights in every state,” a crowd of 1,500 union members and supporters descended on to a stretch of prime D.C. protest real estate blocks from the U.S. Capitol building.

Filling a courtyard that the offices of Fox News, CSPAN, and state Governors’ staff overlook, the crowd flowed in, avoiding the police personnel who stood by to monitor upset motorists. Union vans drove in more workers, some coming from as far away as St. Louis and Los Angeles. Within 15 minutes of the event officially beginning, a quilt of labor logos canvassed a one-block stretch of North Capitol St. between E St. and Louisiana Ave.

Organizers say no senior union official was present—“the workers decided to have their voices heard,” one point man said. The local Washington, D.C. chapter of the AFL-CIO began an email campaign on Tuesday, a day before the rally, writing in bold: “Wisconsinites need our help here in Washington, D.C.”

Turnouts like this one on Wednesday must make Gov. Scott Walker feel very alone. What was supposed to be a conservative sparkplug energizing state leaders across the country to erode collective bargaining rights became a one-man show.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott told WFLA radio “[m]y belief is as long as people know what they’re doing, collective bargaining is fine.” Mitch Daniel, Gov. of Indiana said publicly he’d wish his party would drop union busting measures in the state capitol, and the surly Chris Christie of New Jersey indicated he’s “ready to embrace the collective-bargaining situation.” A USA Today poll shows 61 percent of Americans support collective bargaining rights for public employees.

What Walker wants to achieve in his state--forbidding public sector employees from signing collective bargaining agreements to negotiate pay and benefits—has little to do with shoring up Wisconsin’s budget deficit. With a $137 shortfall for the current fiscal year and a $3.6 billion gap looming the next, no amount of union concessions could fix the problem. And it’s not as if the Badger state’s fiscal woes call for austerity measures. The public pension fund is in one of the best conditions of any in the country, and much of this year’s shortfall could have been prevented if Walker forewent $140 million in pet spending projects, according to the state’s version of the federal Congressional Budget Office. That announcement was made last week, but it also speculated Wisconsin could still end up in the budgetary black.

There are other sources for hauling in additional revenue that the Governor won’t address. The state’s sales tax is 5 percent, much less than these states with Republican governors that all have rates of 7 percent—Indiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Wisconsin’s General Fund, the largest source of money that can be augmented by lawmakers, receives one-third of its revenue from sales tax alone. If the general fund has nearly $14 billion available, a half percent increase could yield $70 million.

Wisconsin is also home to roughly 100,000 millionaires—the income they saved through the high earning tax cuts the president signed into law in December could partly go back to the state in its time of need. And it’s not as if wealthy individuals flee states with high taxes. A 2010 survey conducted by the Phoenix Affluent Marketing Service shows millionaires tend to live in high tax states. A blogger from the North Carolina Justice Center concluded the wealthy “prefer not to give up the great public schools, high-quality public amenities like museums and parks, and sound infrastructure that our taxes make possible.”

So often Walker inveighed against the unions for not participating in the shared sacrifice of all residents, but targeting union contracts exclusively is more an act of singling them out than bidding them to put in their fair share. Raising tax rates just slightly goes a long way to addressing this year’s gap, and the pinch is felt by all rather than some. Nonetheless, unions presented their list of concessions and the governor balked. Before he appeared as a concerned governor pinching pennies anyway he could to keep a budget afloat. But now he looks like an ideologue—a quality Americans ascribe to federal lawmakers and which helps explain why approval ratings for Congress have been so mind-blowingly low.

The politicking was not lost on supporters who attended the Washington rally. “No one’s blind to the fact that this is a brilliant political strategy from the conservative side,” says Caitlin Boston, an assistant strategic analyst at the public employee union American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “[They’re] literally diluting the collective bargaining rights of the most income significant and most prone to voter turnout segment of the population, which is unions.”

A retired D.C. teacher who went by the name of Jerome said, “let’s just call a spade a spade—the Republicans want to balance the budget on the backbones of the working class.”

It is difficult to get a sense of why some conservatives oppose collective bargaining for any reason other than digging their feet into ideological sands. From a purely macroeconomic perspective, the numbers are not on their side. Gov. Daniels of Indiana used an executive order on his first day of office six years ago to ban public sector employees from signing collective bargaining agreements. Since then, workers in the Hoosiers state have gone from 18 in personal per capita income to 40 in 2009, according to an e-mail AFSCME sent to Politico.

That does not seem unlikely. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute explored another favorite union busting trick enforced by 22 state governments, right to work laws, and determined on average wages in those states are 3.2 percent lower than in other states. While various in form, state labor codes that enforce a right-to-work climate do this: They prohibit workers from negotiating a contract that requires workers benefiting from its terms to pay a portion of their wages to monitor the contract. It clips the wings of unions the same way laws preventing collective bargaining agreements do—due-paying union members get little in return and begin to question why they’re in a union in the first place.

The study also determines 71.5 percent of employers in non-RTW states provide their workers either healthcare or a pension; employers in RTW states bat at a much lower 44.9 percent.  Taken nationally, that would translate into a 3.8 percent (two million workers) drop in the number of people receiving job-related health benefits. And the most restrictive figure? The rate of unionization in non-RTW states is nearly double that of RTW states.

This website has scribbled more than a few posts on the wage protection labor groups afford all workers, not just those on union rolls.

At the rally, a representative of FreedomWorks, an organization chaired by former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey that pledges to fight high taxes and invasive government practices, tried to explain the conservative opposition to labor unions.

“I think it’s very detrimental to the free market system—to people who are doing good work who don’t necessarily want to be bullied by union members and pay dues, says Tabitha Hale, the FreedomWorks rep. “Many union members don’t realize they don’t have an option to be in it a lot of the times. And that’s a problem.”

Lisa Wriggle, a nursing assistant in Hillsboro, Ore. can’t think of a single instance of coercion in her work field. She works in a facility that employs 60 people, and they’re all unionized. “I’ve never felt coerced. It’s never been an issue. I was happy to be part of a union shop, and the people I work with, if they don’t want to participate in unions, they don’t. But they know their benefits rest on union dues and support.”

Hale’s description likens unions to cartels—those ‘illiberal’ organizations, like OPEC, that unrealistically inflate commodity values. Her position on lobbying firms or trade groups, perhaps unsurprisingly, is different. “I believe in private organizations organizing to fight for their own rights. Absolutely, that’s a right we have as Americans. I think when it becomes institutionalized people are becoming bullied, when they have to join a union to obtain their benefits.”

She also accused Democratic lawmakers in Wisconsin of not seeing the forest through the trees, “If public opinion was in favor of collective bargaining rights then you wouldn’t have democrats running away from Wisconsin and Indiana to not even have to conversation.” And what about the USA TODAY poll? She says they have no statistical standards. Pressed for a poll that shows Americans oppose collective bargaining, Hale says: “I don’t spend my days looking at polling.”

Joey Combs, an unemployment insurance agency official for the state of Michigan is stark in her assessment of the role labor plays in national affairs. “If you look at the last election cycle, the six top donors, three were major corporations, three were unions. If you eliminate the unions, who’s in control?”

And in light of blogger Ian Murphy of the Buffalo Beast pretending to be right-wing Billionaire David Koch, and earning 20 minutes of Gov. Walker’s time for a phone conversation, Combs may be on to something.

Mikhail Zinshteyn is a staff writer for Campus Progress. You can e-mail him at mzinshteyn@googlemail.com.

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