State legislatures in Idaho, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Florida, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan and Connecticut are all debating bills supposedly meant to limit the rights of teachers and other state and civil workers to bargain collectively. These fury-provoking proposals may, however, be over nothing more than an attempt at political resume-padding by a few Republicans who want to claim to have fought for lower government spending. I've been looking over the text of the Wisconsin version of this measure, and I'm not sure I find any real restriction to either state spending or the collective bargaining rights of state and civil employees.
In spite of the bill's own bragging claim of ending the collective bargaining rights of state workers, I couldn't find a single line in it preventing any union from taking any specific type of action. Admittedly, I could have missed a Declaration of War in the thing; the majority of it is, after all, a long and confusing tract affirming and amending various other laws by identification number. Not having a real means of identifying any of the laws cited or of researching the legal rulings for each, I can only comment on what I understood, but to my very fallible eyes, the bill just seems like a very insecure piece of legislation trying to show off by bragging that it's taking on organized labor. Outside of the thing's own assurance that it intended to end the collective bargaining of teachers, I could find only two sections in it that seem to challenge the rights of workers to participate in unions or the rights of unions to bargain for their membership, and both of them struck me as feeble at best. I also found a few attempts to cut government spending, but I'm pretty sure these measures are fairly weak too.
The bill's supposed "union killer" clause is probably one permitting union members to refrain from paying union dues. The legislators are probably hoping for the teachers simply to stop paying their dues and thus dry the union of funds, but this idea would work only on a union with a fairly short-sighted membership. Workers without long-term prospects with an employer may be less likely to strike and more likely to keep their union payments than entrenched ones, but teachers are very entrenched. First of all, they usually have a limited job market, and so they are very likely to stay at the same school. Furthermore, as they receive pay raises for seniority, each year they have more of a reason to stay in place. In the face of this immobility then, they are at least liable to keep paying union dues out of a fear of losing a greater amount of money than those dues through pay cuts or inventive systems of reimbursement.
Another, probably lesser anti-union measure is one specifying that workers will have to bargain on a year-by-year basis and that if a given set of workers cannot choose a union to represent them in a given year, they will go unionless for that year. The bill does nothing, however, to prevent negotiators from simply reaching a long term agreement without making a formal contract, and the unions would have to be idiots not pursue such agreements. Furthermore, workers under the purview of this clause may choose to keep to their current union simply to avoid being without any, and so the bill may ironically drive them into the arms of the very unions that Sarah Palin has compared to "thugs."
A third, though only possible, anti-union measure in the bill is one permitting the firing of any state employee for three unexcused absences during one or more declared states of emergency. Theoretically, a Governor or Mayor could use this part of the law to declare a state of emergency during a strike by any teachers or other state or civil employees, but at best--and best is not the same as normal!--this measure would only limit workers from staging a walk-out. Unions, however, can have more than one trick up their sleeve. Firstly, they can use their lawyers either to sue the state or to harass it; or they can simply find some new way to bring productivity to a halt. Either things can bring pressure to a city or state without being a strike.
Interestingly, in another of the bill's possible backfires, it also attempts to cut state spending, at least slightly, by cutting the retirement benefits of elected employees. Currently, a retired elected employee in Wisconsin receives a sum of 2% of his or her final average earnings multiplied by the number of his or her years of creditable employment. The bill, however, wants to decrease that percentage to 1.6%, theoretically removing two-fifths of said employees post-office income. This sounds like a real pay-slash for politicians of course, but personally, I don't expect the politicos to accept pay-cuts gladly. They can, after all, raise their own pay, and according to Joe Liebham, Wisconsin State Senator for District 9, they've already done so.
The bill's one other attempt to cut government spending may be roughly as ineffective. The bill mandates the Illinois Department of Human Services to study--merely to study!--ways to increase the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of health care in the state. The words already sound abstract to me, and therefore likely to cause nothing but a long inspection of options, but the bill goes further to promote this possible waste of governmental man-hours by requiring the Department of Human Services to submit any proposals to both the Joint Committee on Finance and the Federal Department of Health and Human Services. In all probability then, this law places control for the passage of health care reforms in the hands of a set of unelected federal bureaucrats with no specific interest in the well-being of the citizens of Wisconsin, and it also gives a de-facto veto to whoever with sufficient influence in the Joint Committee on Finance to prevent a bill from being presented to the legislature.
In light of the bill's seeming ineffectiveness, I have to wonder about its supporters sincerity in the fight to cut federal spending. Are they presenting such bills simply in order to seem like men of their supposedly tea-drinking people? If so, the ruse is amazingly effective. Wisconsin teachers are already offering to cut their own pay in order to keep their possibly unthreatened bargaining rights. Still, to my mind, the proposal's apparent lack of content may betray a very real limitation of the representatives of this newest voting block: the unwillingness and inability of politicians to risk their reputations on making real-world change. They will not risk looking unelectably foolish even for the most necessary cause, and not even a hot new constituency is going to change their dodgy ways. Personally, I can only hope for voters to see that and reject what I perceive as more of the same in brand new clothing.
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