By Charles Krauthammer, Published:
June 7
Tuesday, June 5, 2012, will be
remembered as the beginning of the long decline of the public-sector union. It
will follow, and parallel, the shrinking of private-sector unions, now down to
less than 7 percent of American workers. The abject failure of the unions to
recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) — the first such failure in U.S. history
— marks the Icarus moment of government-union power. Wax wings melted, there’s
nowhere to go but down.
The ultimate significance of Walker’s
union reforms has been largely misunderstood. At first, the issue was curtailing
outrageous union benefits, far beyond those of the ordinary Wisconsin taxpayer.
That became a nonissue when the unions quickly realized that trying to defend
the indefensible would render them toxic for the real fight to
come.
So they made the fight about the
“right” to collective bargaining, which the reforms severely restricted. In a
state as historically progressive as Wisconsin — in 1959, it was the first to
legalize the government-worker union — they thought they could win as a matter
of ideological fealty.
But as the recall campaign progressed,
the Democrats stopped talking about bargaining rights. It was a losing issue.
Walker was able to make the case that years of corrupt union-politician
back-scratching had been bankrupting the state. And he had just enough time to
demonstrate the beneficial effects of overturning that arrangement: a huge
budget deficit closed without raising taxes, significant school-district savings
from ending cozy insider health-insurance contracts, and a modest growth in
jobs.
The real threat behind all this,
however, was that the new law ended automatic government collection of union
dues. That was the unexpressed and politically inexpressible issue. That was the
reason the unions finally decided to gamble on a high-risk recall.
Without the thumb of the state tilting
the scale by coerced collection, union membership became truly voluntary.
Result? Newly freed members rushed for the exits. In less than one year,
AFSCME, the second-largest public-sector union in Wisconsin, has lost more than
50 percent of its membership.
It was predictable. In Indiana, where
Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) instituted by executive order a similar reform seven
years ago, government-worker unions have since lost 91 percent of their
dues-paying membership. In Wisconsin, Democratic and union bosses (a redundancy)
understood what was at stake if Walker prevailed: not benefits, not “rights,”
but the very existence of the unions.
So they fought and they lost.
Repeatedly. Tuesday was their third and last shot at reversing Walker’s reforms.
In April 2011, they ran a candidate for chief justice of the state Supreme Court
who was widely expected to strike down the law. She lost.
In July and August 2011, they ran
recall elections of state senators, needing three to reclaim Democratic — i.e.,
union — control. They failed. (The likely flipping of one Senate seat to the
Democrats on June 5 is insignificant. The Senate is not in session and won’t be
until after yet another round of elections in November.)
And then, Tuesday, their Waterloo.
Walker defeated their gubernatorial candidate by a wider margin than he had —
pre-reform — two years ago.
The unions’ defeat marks a historical
inflection point. They set out to make an example of Walker. He succeeded in
making an example of them as a classic case of reactionary liberalism. An
institution founded to protect its members grew in size, wealth, power and
arrogance, thanks to decades of symbiotic deals with bought politicians, to the
point where it grossly overreached. A half-century later these unions were
exercising essential control of everything from wages to work rules in the
running of government — something that, in a system of republican governance, is
properly the sovereign province of the citizenry.
Why did the unions lose? Because Norma
Rae nostalgia is not enough, and it hardly applied to government workers living
better than the average taxpayer who supports them.
And because of the rise of a new
constitutional conservatism — committed to limited government and a more robust
civil society — of the kind that swept away Democrats in the 2010 midterm
shellacking.
Most important, however, because in
the end reality prevails. As economist Herb Stein once put it: Something that
can’t go on, won’t. These public-sector unions, acting, as FDR had feared, with
an inherent conflict of interest regarding their own duties, were devouring the
institution they were supposed to serve, rendering state government as
economically unsustainable as the collapsing entitlement states of southern
Europe.
It couldn’t go on. Now it won’t. All
that was missing was a political leader willing to risk his career to make it
stop. Because, time being infinite, even the inevitable doesn’t happen on its
own.
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