unions

Wisconsin Judge’s Strange Ruling Blocking Limits on Collective Bargaining Surprises Legal Observers

by Hans Bader on March 25, 2011 · 2 comments

in Labor, Legal

Wisconsin legal observers were “surprised last week when Madison-based judge Maryann Sumi issued a temporary restraining order blocking implementation of Gov. Scott Walker’s bill to limit public-sector collective bargaining.” A law professor was “astonished” by the legally-baseless ruling, which didn’t even bother to “address the relevant laws and rules that demonstrate that what the legislature did was proper.”

The judge’s decision made no legal or logical sense, but did make political sense: the judge has to run for reelection in a liberal area, and her own son was a union organizer. Her son is a liberal political operative who also happens to be a former lead field manager with the AFL-CIO and data manager for the SEIU State Council. Moreover, the judge’s husband is a campaign donor to three of the Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to block the passage of the collective bargaining law, as well as a donor to Gov. Walker’s opponent.

Judges in Wisconsin have to run for reelection, and this judge is elected in liberal Dane County, where the new collective bargaining law was resoundingly unpopular, and the new governor lost by a wide margin even while winning easily statewide.

There was little legal basis for the judge’s ruling. The Senate Chief Clerk and non-partisan legislative attorneys signed off on the legislation being consistent with the open-meetings law.

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Obamacare’s Costs Rise, as Obama Backers Get Preferential Treatment

by Hans Bader on March 7, 2011 · 1 comment

in Economy, Features, Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Regulation

Post image for Obamacare’s Costs Rise, as Obama Backers Get Preferential Treatment

The cost of Obamacare continues to explode and exceed its sponsors’ predictions. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has now admitted to double-counting in the Obamacare budget, using the same $500 billion twice, first “to sustain” the existing Medicare program and then to “pay for” brand new Obamacare entitlements. Last year, the CBO hiked its estimate of Obamacare’s costs by $115 billion, even as many of its promised benefits failed to materialize.

Obamacare was supposed to save patients money by curbing insurance company profits and expanding state Medicaid programs to cover millions more people. (This expansion was criticized by state officials, including a few Democrats such as former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, who called it “the mother of all unfunded mandates.” Bredesen’s health care legal advisor concluded that Obamacare’s Medicaid-expansion provisions were unconstitutional.)

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Did Wisconsin Police Violate the First Amendment through Selective Enforcement of Limits on Protests?

by Hans Bader on March 3, 2011 · 1 comment

in Features, Labor, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Post image for Did Wisconsin Police Violate the First Amendment through Selective Enforcement of Limits on Protests?

Ordinarily, protesters who tried to occupy the Wisconsin Capitol Building would be swiftly arrested and removed. But this weekend, police in Madison, Wisconsin, not only allowed pro-union protesters to stay and sleep in the state Capitol Building, they joined them.

Wisconsin union supporters applauded this lawlessness. One exulted, “Police have just announced to the crowds inside the occupied State Capitol of Wisconsin: ‘We have been ordered by the legislature to kick you all out at 4:00 today. But we know what’s right from wrong. We will not be kicking anyone out, in fact, we will be sleeping here with you!’ Unreal.”  (Days later, the police finally told the protesters to leave the Capitol Building, but “didn’t evict“ them at that time, and protesters were still camped out in the Capitol Building on the morning of March 1, with their garbage and trash littering the building and the surrounding areas. By the time the police finally took grudging action to limit the protesters’ access to the building, it was during business hours — when the building has traditionally been open to the public. So a union lawyer then promptly got a temporary restraining order that, with little explanation, forced Wisconsin officials to reopen the building to the public during business hours, thus making it harder for them to clean up the building and prevent future occupations.)

This foot-dragging by police and their selective enforcement of the law was a violation of federal court rulings, like Dwares v. City of New York (1992), that require police to enforce the law in a viewpoint neutral manner. In Dwares, police were sued for refusing to arrest people who attacked flag-burners because they disagreed with the flag-burners’ message — even though police ordinarily enforce laws against assault.

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Bogus Statistic from Wisconsin Union Backers Spreads Despite Repeated Debunking

by Hans Bader on February 28, 2011 · 6 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

Post image for Bogus Statistic from Wisconsin Union Backers Spreads Despite Repeated Debunking

“A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on” — like a false statistic recently spread by supporters of Wisconsin’s government-employee unions, such as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Despite being debunked by PolitiFact, it has since been widely repeated in multiple letters to the editor, and it remains uncorrected on the web sites of publications like The Economist.

On Wednesday, PolitiFact debunked the claim by Wisconsin union supporters that Virginia, which bans collective bargaining in state agencies, ranks 44th in the nation in ACT/SAT scores, compared to Wisconsin ranking 2nd. For example, it noted that in 2009, Virginia ranked 22nd in ACT scores, while Wisconsin ranked 13th. As PolitiFact notes, this claim was originally disseminated by the Wisconsin Democratic Party, which has now retracted it.

(Although PolitiFact didn’t note this, in 2010, Virginia actually beat Wisconsin in ACT scores, with Virginia ranked 12th and Wisconsin ranked 17th. Unlike Wisconsin, Virginia is a right-to-work state that bars forcing employees to pay union dues. Collective bargaining with government employee unions is currently mandated in Wisconsin, but banned in Virginia.)

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Wisconsin Union Backers Defame Virginia and Spread Bogus Statistics

by Hans Bader on February 26, 2011 · 1 comment

in Features, Labor, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Zeitgeist

Post image for Wisconsin Union Backers Defame Virginia and Spread Bogus Statistics

Virginia schools have better-than-average test scores. Virginia obviously doesn’t rank an abysmal 44th in the nation on SATs and ACTs, as supporters of Wisconsin government-employee unions keep falsely claiming. They’re making that claim up because Virginia bans collective bargaining by government employees, and Wisconsin, which currently mandates collective bargaining in government agencies, is considering proposals by its newly-elected conservative governor to bar such bargaining in areas like pensions, which frequently result in government costs being passed on to future generations.

In 2009, Virginia ranked in the middle of states on the ACT and SAT, and in 2010, it actually outranked Wisconsin on the ACT (12th vs. 17th in “average composite score“). The reason it doesn’t rank higher on the SAT is because so many of its students take the test – including marginal students who wouldn’t even take them in another state. (Wisconsin boasts a higher average SAT score than Virginia partly because only “four percent” of Wisconsin students took the SAT, compared to “67 percent” in Virginia. Virginia’s lower average SAT score is a function of a larger pool, not dumb students or bad schools, as PolitiFact pointed out in debunking the false claim that Virginia ranks 44th.)

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CEI Podcast for February 24, 2011: On, Wisconsin

by Ryan Young on February 24, 2011

in Features, Labor, Podcast

Post image for CEI Podcast for February 24, 2011: On, Wisconsin

Have a listen here.

Vice President for Strategy Iain Murray, who also directs CEI’s Center for Economic Freedom, discusses the labor reforms that have led to a thousands-strong sustained protest in Madison, Wisconsin. While the reforms themselves are relatively minor, both sides know that the stakes are high. This may prove to be at a watershed moment in the relationship between public sector unions and taxpayers.

Image credit: WxMom’s flickr photostream.

No, Wisconsin’s Budget Deficit Wasn’t “Manufactured” by Walker and the GOP

by Hans Bader on February 23, 2011 · 2 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

Post image for No, Wisconsin’s Budget Deficit Wasn’t “Manufactured” by Walker and the GOP

Wisconsin is one of the most heavily taxed states in the country, and its government employees are paid much better than the state’s taxpayers. Like many states, it’s facing a substantial budget deficit. But when the state’s newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, attempted to place reasonable limits on government-employee pay and collective bargaining, liberal commentators such as Rachel Maddow falsely claimed that the state’s budget crisis was manufactured, and that Wisconsin actually had a projected budget surplus.

This claim has now been debunked by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which endorsed Obama in 2008 and John Kerry in 2004: “Our conclusion: Maddow and the others are wrong. There is, indeed, a projected deficit that required attention, and Walker and GOP lawmakers did not create it.” Maddow blamed the state’s current deficit on business tax breaks supported by the governor, but those cuts are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the state’s overall budget; and as the Journal-Sentinel noted, “the cuts are not even in effect yet, so they cannot be part of the current problem.”

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Obama Fans the Flames in Wisconsin, Seeking to Block State Budget Reforms

by Hans Bader on February 21, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Labor

State employees are paid better than people in the private sector. But government-employee unions refuse to make sacrifices to help close huge state budget deficits. Democratic legislators allied with those unions shut down the Wisconsin State Senate last week, fleeing the state to Illinois in order to block a quorum. Meanwhile, “over 1,000 teachers” called “in sick to force the closure of schools in Madison, Wisconsin” for another day, in a massive shutdown of Wisconsin schools.

Obama is fanning the flames, reports The Washington Post:

President Obama thrust himself and his political operation this week into Wisconsin’s broiling budget battle, mobilizing opposition Thursday to a Republican bill that would curb public-worker benefits and planning similar protests in other state capitals. . . .The president’s political machine worked in close coordination Thursday with state and national union officials to get thousands of protesters to gather in Madison and to plan similar demonstrations in other state capitals.

Wisconsin’s governor has been vitriolically attacked by state employees for seeking to limit their pay and collective-bargaining privileges. Some of these protesters are wielding signs bearing the words uttered by John Wilkes Booth as he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, “sic semper tyrannis.” Others are putting crosshairs on pictures of his face, along with the word “reload.” Others are branding him as “Hitler,” or comparing him to the fascist dictator Mussolini and Egypt’s recently ousted ruler Mubarak. So much for the short-lived era of civility that Obama and his supporters preached without practicing.

To shut down the Wisconsin State Senate, all the Democratic senators fled to a hotel in Illinois, which has a sympathetic Democratic governor. (Illinois Governor Pat Quinn just signed into law a 67 percent increase in income taxes, after a campaign in which he promised the state’s well-paid workers no layoffs and two-years of cost-of-living increases. Never mind that Illinois already has more government employees per person than neighboring Indiana.)

States are required by their constitutions to balance their budgets. The federal government doesn’t have to. So it’s easy for Obama, who has the ability to run up record deficits to hire tens of thousands of new federal employees, to fault cash-strapped state governments for trying to reduce the entitlements and collective bargaining rights of their employees. As Victor Davis Hanson notes, “what distinguishes Obama’s homespun platitudes about public-sector jobs from state governors’ more honest worries is just that ability. . .But pass a law that the U.S. must balance its books like the states must,” and President Obama might change his tune.

(Obama ran up the largest deficit in history in 2010, running up more debt in just one month than Bush did in the entire year of 2007. Obama’s recent budget proposal increases spending over the next two years while pretending to cut it, drawing criticism even from the liberal Washington Post.)

Even with budget cuts, government employees in Wisconsin would still live far better than the taxpayers who pay their salary. Wisconsin’s governor “would require many state workers to contribute 5.8 percent of their salary toward their pensions (up from 5 percent) and pay 12.6 percent of their insurance premiums — still much less than the average Wisconsinite pays for insurance through work.” As the Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso notes, “I defy anyone to find a private sector workplace where you can contribute only 6 percent for a generous defined benefit retirement plan, and have your employer pick up the tab for 88 percent of your health insurance. It just doesn’t exist. What we’re seeing is a protest based on disrespect for the taxpayers who are picking up the tab, most of whom do not make as much as the members of the teacher’s union.”

The public-sector unionization that Obama so prizes is something America just can’t afford.  As The Washington Post’s Charles Lane notes:

The truth of the matter is that ‘collective bargaining’ in the public sector is too often a parody of the real thing. For years, public-employee unions have used their dues money to help elect pliant politicians — usually Democrats — who, in turn, award the unions what they want at contract time. The taxpaying public’s only role in this costly cycle is to foot the bill. It’s not democracy when citizens lose control over the pay and benefits of the people who work for them. It’s not progressive when employee compensation takes finite resources away from Medicaid, parks, roads and libraries. And it’s not collective bargaining when union representatives sit on both sides of the table.

Obama Instigating Disruptive Wisconsin Protests to Protect Union Privileges

by Hans Bader on February 18, 2011 · 5 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor

In the Washington Examiner today, I discuss how Obama and his allies are helping orchestrate the disruptive Wisconsin protests that have shut down many of its schools. The Democrats in the Wisconsin State Senate have fled the state to deprive the legislature of a quorum needed to pass fiscal reforms backed by Wisconsin’s conservative governor that would reduce the privileges of the state’s public-employee unions.

As The Wall Street Journal notes, those reforms would not only reduce gold-plated employee benefits, but also curb the entrenched power of liberal lawmakers by ending the practice of automatically withdrawing money from public-employee paychecks to finance the government-employee unions, which make almost all of their political donations to liberals:

Unions are treating these reforms as Armageddon because they’ve owned the Wisconsin legislature for years and the changes would reduce their dominance. Under Governor Walker’s proposal, the government also would no longer collect union dues from paychecks and then send that money to the unions. Instead, unions would be responsible for their own collection regimes. The bill would also require unions to be recertified annually by a majority of all members. Imagine that: More accountability inside unions.

As David Freddoso notes at the Washington Examiner, Wisconsin government employees are better paid than the state’s taxpayers. At the Daily Caller, CEI’s Ryan Young notes that there are political risks to well-paid public-employees effectively shutting down the government to preserve their perks. On the other hand, liberal bloggers and most liberal journalists seem to be backing the protesters, despite their inflammatory rhetoric (like depicting the governor as Hitler or invoking the words of Lincoln’s assassin) and defiance of a democratically-elected governor and legislature. One exception is The Washington Post‘s Charles Lane, who worries about steadily-rising government-employee pay crowding out other needs, and says that “it’s not progressive when employee compensation takes finite resources away from Medicaid, parks, roads and libraries.”

U.S. Continues to Ignore Staunch Trade Partner and Ally Colombia — And Possible Consequences

by Fran Smith on February 17, 2011 · 1 comment

in Agenda for Congress, International, Trade

As the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement languishes, the U.S. stands to lose some of its influence with that staunch and critical ally in South America. The agreement was signed in 2006, then, in mid-2007, at the behest of the Congressional leadership under Nancy Pelosi, had stringent environmental and labor provisions inserted, and since then, has been largely ignored by the administration.

The major opposition all along the way has been from U.S. trade unions, which charge the Colombia is not doing enough to stop violence against domestic trade union leaders and members. Yet Cato research has shown that “the rate for union killings was 5.3 per 100,000 unionists in 2010, six times lower than the homicide rate for the overall population (33.9 per 100,000 inhabitants).” Colombia is still a violent country, but the strengthening of the legal system in Colombia under former President Alvaro Uribe and continued under the new President Juan Manuel Santos has meant that a larger percentage of perpetrators of union violence have come to justice.

Meanwhile, Colombian leaders were gracious even though they were pushing for fast action on the pact. The U.S., after all, is Colombia’s chief trading partner, and they were looking for assurance through the trade pact that the tariff preferences in the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA) would continue into the future, without having to be reauthorized each year as is now the case.

Colombia’s patience may be wearing thin, and that wouldn’t be good news for the U.S.  Already China is Colombia’s number two trading partner and may overtake the U.S. if the FTA isn’t implemented. There’s also a new twist that increases the odds that this will happen. China and Colombia are having very serious discussions about China building a transcontinental railroad across Colombia – from the Atlantic to the Pacific — that would be a “rail canal” rivaling the Panama Canal for moving imports and exports across Latin America.

Now that would be a real coup of a different kind.

The Obama administration should get its head out of the sand and put the three pending FTAs on the fast track. Colombia already gets preferential tariffs under the ATPDEA. With the U.S.-Colombia deal, Colombia would remove more than 80 percent of Colombian duties on U.S. imports, with the remaining tariffs being phased out over ten years.

But that’s not the only reason, as CEI noted:

The agreement can also promote the national security interests of both Colombia and the U.S. Colombia faces increased tensions with its near neighbors, as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stokes anti-American sentiment. Ecuador briefly suspended diplomatic ties with Colombia after Colombian forces raided a narco-terrorist camp located in that country. Approval of the FTA will bolster Colombia’s ties with the U.S. and standing in the region, and help counter Chavez’s influence.

Image credit: tanya~b’s flickr photostream.

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