What’s up in Wisconsin?

Does WI have a recall provision?

Demonstrations are all well and good. If they’re all you’ve got, of course you use them. But at the end of the day, they’re just PR. They can only serve to make actual practical steps possible.

The Senate Dems leaving the state to prevent a quorum is all well and good. But that only buys a delay.

The key move in a democracy is to win the next election. Of course you don’t want to wait for the next regular election, so the question is whether WI has a recall that would permit immediate elections to replace the governor and the R legislature. If it does, replacing these people is what you need to do, and every other move needs to be taken in furtherance of that end. The mere threat will make them abandon their plans to bust the unions. Not that even total capitulation should halt a recall movement.

You have to do more than win elections. You have to actually elect people who will use power once they have it, not just bide time till the next election

How accurate is the report that Walker created the budget shortfall with tax cuts and increased spending?

The statement from past and current Packers — Super Bowl winners, idiosyncratically mutually-owned, emblematic of Wisconsin blue-collardom — came at the right time:

The right to negotiate wages and benefits is a fundamental underpinning of our middle class. When workers join together it serves as a check on corporate power and helps ALL workers by raising community standards.

(The fact that the NFL players are heading into a potentially rough set of negotiations with the owners and league perhaps sharpened things a little, too. Top-flight sport remains one of the few areas in which union collective bargaining is not considered as something that can be stripped at will.)

For some reason I thought collective bargaining rights for public employees had been guaranteed by federal law.

It’s the opposite — non-public employees are guaranteed collective bargaining rights. Walker’s bill would take away from local and state workers the rights that every other worker in the state has.

If they serve the general public, I would think normative democratic theory would suggest exploiting them to the maximum extent possible.

Well, it’s complicated. They serve the general public, but also, they ARE the general public. And what quality of work do you get from workers that are exploited to the maximum extent possible? Especially if they know it? Government can’t just go bankrupt and let a competitor take over the industry, like a failed business; the stakes are higher. Public responsibilities have to be done, and done well, or your state/country ends up like Somalia. If that takes more money… so be it.

There are a lot worse things in the world than paying more taxes, as any Somali could tell you. (Including having lousy pretax income because you have no rights w.r.t. your employer, or you are unemployed, or your whole state’s economy has imploded due to dysfunctional infrastructure or a lack of rule of law. Even on a purely economic and self-interested basis, taxes can be a big win for the taxpayers.)

Glen – A recall petition is going out for 9 Republican State Senators, both online and on the street in front of the Capitol.

http://taa-madison.org/2011/02/recall-petition/

Dr. Science – A number of sources have been reporting that the state was originally going to have a surplus, until Walker passed tax-breaks for some businesses and private health savings accounts last month. This is largely being reported in blogs (for the New York Times and Washington Post) and on Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz’s shows on MSNBC, but they’re all pointing to a memo from our non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau to back up their claims.

The memo: http://legis.wisconsin.gov/lfb/Misc/2011_01_31Vos&Darling.pdf

Some of the articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/opinion/18fri1.html
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_90196216-3b66-11e0-a327-001cc4c03286.html
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/editorial/article_61064e9a-27b0-5f28-b6d1-a57c8b2aaaf6.html

Danielle Wylie,

Thanks for the link. I e-mailed the TAA that I would be willing to drive in to carry petitions in this effort, but they are perhaps not the best folks on the ground to contact about putting out-of-state volunteers to good use. Do you perhaps have a link to the folks who, hoepfully, are organizing a wider effort than just the TAA can be expected to manage?

Taking a deep breath, hoping not to jinx it… are we seeing the tide turn?

Ohio Senate Bill 5 is a similar attempt to end state workers collective bargaining rights. With, again, a Republican governor and solid Republican majorities in both houses, it looked like a done deal. But if WI can stop this, who knows?

“and a requirement that workers be allowed to be union members without paying dues.”

So to government wants to decide that you can be a member of an organization without paying the membership fees? This isn’t even libertarian, it’s just plain silly.

I don’t know the law in other states, particularly Wisconsin.

It’s a “they do sometimes anyway” situation. My dad resigned. Lots of people have resigned (I hope somebody’s collecting that data.) It’s hectic. Lots of others are calling in sick, for semi-plausible deniability purposes.

Individuals who provide “essential services” (this is expansively defined, including teachers and correction officers and lots of others) cannot strike. In all other cases, unless a municipality specifically agreed to allow striking when they negotiated a dispute settlement procedure with the union (yea right), a strike’s only legal after a waiting period after arbitration through the WI Employment Relations Commission fails, i.e. there’s a well-defined bureaucratic procedure one must go through prior to striking, in order to strike legally. [Take all this with a dose of salt; IANAL and don’t have a cite handy. Would be happy to have this confirmed or refuted!]

Sorry, link I made didn’t work.
SUBCHAPTER V STATE EMPLOYMENT LABOR RELATIONS, 111.89 Strike prohibited.
http://legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/Stat0111.pdf

My only question is: how on earth did Wisconsin end up with a quorum requirement greater than a simple majority? High-fives for the Democrats and all that, but that’s one weird quorum.

Does this quorum requirement only apply when they are outside of the state borders? There must be some reason why the Democratic senators have travelled out of the state.

TGGP,

Let’s keep it simple. Public sector workers get paid less than private sector ones. Many of their benefits come in the form of pension guarantees. The primary benefit you get as a public sector employee is the insurance that your job will still be here and pay reasonably well 20 years from now when you are 55 and don’t have the opportunity to reinvest in new job skills (and you will still have that same pension). The benefit of having a union is not the wages you bargain for today, but the wages that you can be confident that you will still be able to secure in 20 years. I’m not an economist, so I don’t know if there is a reference to this concept in their literature, but this form of job security is a huge part of why people take public sector jobs. If you make collective bargaining illegal, you substantially erode this security. Since I doubt that the government will actually pay much more (you are probably right that the government will not behave much like a firm when setting wages), they will probably just get much lower quality workers if this kind of law becomes common place.

I would also note that there are private sector companies that try to do this. National Instruments makes a big deal out of never having layoffs (though they do fire underperforming workers). People take less money to work at NI, ostensibly because of the job security and environment. It is harder for a private sector company to credibly make this commitment, however, since the firm could go out of business over the lifetime of an employee’s career.

pretty much everything in TGGP’s post is working from ideological goal->conclusion->facts, instead of the other way around. I wonder if you combined it with a time machine, it would be good.

I just remembered an argument I believe I read in the nonunlikeresearch thread. It is that state employment will be used for cronyism and patronage if left to politicians. Unions will constrains the system toward acting in a somewhat more meritocratic basis. Oddly enough, I first remember hearing an argument along those lines from Steve Sailer had been making that argument in the context of Ricci vs New Haven. I think that argument has some logic to it and would have to be examined as an empirical matter.

So why is it in the interest of the general public to have a union on the other end of the table, rather than exploiting their virtual monopsony to the fullest?

TGGP, but along the same line of argument: why shouldn’t the general public repeal, say, the child-labor laws, for the public sector? Can you provide justification for not doing it? Isn’t it that the general public just wants to be fair and civilized.

Well, the right to unionize is in the universal declaration of human rights, so it’s not just a matter of being nice.

I’m not saying that the typical model of a public employees union is what’s required by the udhr; I’m just saying that it’s one of the fundamental rights. Perhaps the general public in not willing to play games with it, you know, just to save a couple of bucks a year for the average taxpayer.

The justification for public employee unions is that private individuals in the state’s employ formed themselves into them pursuant to their right to associate. that is not auditable for further justification by the public. The public has cause to inquire into justifications for laws governing the way the state chooses to relate to such organizations. A justification for the granting of a stable collective bargaining regime to such unions is that it manages, controls, and makes predictable the course of relations between the state and the unions, which is desirable as compared to a pure power dynamic in which a well-organized union will likely have the ability to deny essential services at important junctures. So you grant bargaining in exchange for an agreement (codified in prohibitive law) that there will not be strikes so long as good faith negotiating is ongoing. Etc. This predictability and continuity of service is manifestly more in the interest of the public (and its elected representatives assuming a desire to continue to be elected representatives) than the alternative discontinuity and unreliability of service. That’s why you have the elder Reps and Sens around here (madison dude here) talking about “60 years of labor peace” in the public workforce being endangered by this. Now, if you want to say that public unions are so unjustified (despite the likelihood that uncertainty about service continuity would likely be present in a condition of complete lack of public worker organization and in an ungoverned power-on-power organized condition) as to be unilaterally denied by law basic rights that service providers in the private economy retain, such as striking, you can go that direction I suppose. Or if you want to say to the PEU, yes you have the right, but tsk tsk for going ahead and choosing to organize; I don’t consider it justified, you can do that too. But clearly individuals just as often initially associate into orgs out of a desire to effectively pursue collective interest interior to the new org, or even individual interest aided by membership, not always to pursue broad societal interest, so demanding public justification for that act is a rather novel request. When people form companies, do we demand a justification for the mere act of forming, before seeing whether there are negative externalities to their subsequent actions?

TGGP – it doesn;t matter what troubles there were or weren’t; when they were restricted from organizing, they were being denied a basic right that derives from a fundamental human proclivity – to associate. It is private people who make the choice whether or not to sell services to the state, or to continue to do so once one begins to. People do not surrender their status an private individuals when they agree to sell services to the state; as such they do not surrender the right to associate. If you are for denying them that right; then you are for it. But it is a basic right nevertheless. Once the right is recognized, and associations are formed, it is then up to the polity to decide how to deal with existing associations of people whose services to the state it would like to retain. I have offered the justification or assenting to bargaining with the associations collectively above.

I am starting to wonder if we even have a functioning democracy in Madison right now, or are we just to the point where “political will power” takes on a new meaning.

My understanding is that US labor law, as applicable to industry and all other unions, permits a very narrow range of rights to the union: negotiating only for labor conditions related to pay and very few non-compensation and -hours related rights. In particular, unions are not permitted to have a say in how the workplace is to be run. Unions are required to recognize the sole right of management to decide how the organization is to carry out its tasks. Unions may be permitted to govern workers, but they are not permitted to govern the workplace. Unions are to prohibit certain labor actions.

In return for following these and other regulations, unions are granted government recognition, which in turn mandates management recognition, generally including deduction of dues and collective bargaining.

I don’t think there is any question that very little having to do with unions in the US has not been broken down for more than 30 years. There are of course more recent union movements that have had successes. But this law (a) breaks an existing contract, and (b) eliminates the only process for forming new contracts regarding hours and compensation that exists, just to break the unions, in a situation where (c) governments have been inclined to make working conditions worse arbitrarily just to punish either (i) the union or (ii) the group the union represents.

Requesting a consequentialist argument for acceptance is itself unacceptable. That’s what a right is. As for favoring unionization, clearly many people do not. Unions organize around self interest. We don’t demand universal consequentialist defenses of other instances of people organizing for their benefit, so I hold that this is a case of special scrutiny and reject your request as unfair. If it is not, you will be able to direct me to where you have demanded consequentialist justifications for other types of organizations based on self-interest. Where a consequentialist request is appropriate is in a polity determining how it will deal with the fact of a union of people it would like to keep in its employ. I have offered a potential line of justification for granting collective bargaining to such unions that a polity might consider, but obviously all other manner of consideration is appropriate for a polity to take into account in making the decision as well.