No matter what the outcome of today’s recall election, nothing substantive will change in Wisconsin. Even if organized labor were to sweep all six recall elections of Republican state senators, the unions would still not have the votes in the Assembly to pass any legislation. They will not be able to restore the government union’s lavish benefits, which were brought down to Earth this spring. And even if they were somehow able to muster legislation through both the Senate and the Republican-controlled Assembly, they still will not have enough votes to overturn a veto by Governor Scott Walker.
According to the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, a Wisconsin think tank, Big Labor and its allies have funneled over $14 million into the recall effort.
The Washington Post reports that much of the money (on both sides) comes from groups outside of Wisconsin.
Outside groups — led by national unions on the Democratic side and limited government groups such as the Wisconsin Club for Growth on the Republican side — have shoveled more than $25 million into the recall effort, with both sides spending about the same amount. The candidates, meanwhile, have raised more than $5 million.
The staggering dollar amounts being showered on the eight recall campaigns — which after a July 19 election and Tuesday’s six contests will conclude with two elections on Aug. 16 — are shattering state records. In 2010, when the 99-member assembly and half the 33-member state Senate was up for election, outside organizations spent $3.75 million in Wisconsin — 15 percent of this year’s total.
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Appleton, Wisconsin, police taught some children a lesson about regulation’s true purpose by shutting down their lemonade and cookie stands. The children live about a block from an annual Old Car Show, and have been selling lemonade and cookies near the event for six years.
Vendors inside the car show didn’t appreciate the competition. So they talked the city government into passing a new ordinance that put the girls out of business.
After a round of bad publicity, city officials are thinking of re-writing the ordinance.
Of the various hyperbolic leftist talking points against the recently enacted Wisconsin collective bargaining law, the “war on teachers” was easily the most shrill, dumb, and tiresome. It was also flat wrong.
Now a similar collective bargaining reform by the Kaukauna Area School District (part of the Appleton metro area) is projected to shift the District’s budget from a substantial deficit to a large surplus. The Appleton Post Crescent reports:
As changes to collective bargaining powers for public workers take effect today, the Kaukauna Area School District is poised to swing from a projected $400,000 budget shortfall next year to a $1.5 million surplus due to health care and retirement savings.
The Kaukauna School Board approved changes Monday to its employee handbook that require staff to cover 12.6 percent of their health insurance and to contribute 5.8 percent of their wages to the state’s pension system, in accordance with the new collective bargaining law, commonly known as Act 10.
“These impacts will allow the district to hire additional teachers (and) reduce projected class sizes,” School Board President Todd Arnoldussen wrote in a statement Monday.
Teachers unions have been advocating reduced class sizes for years. Whatever the merit of smaller classes — and there is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes an “ideal” classroom headcount — they would require the hiring of more teachers, resulting in more dues-paying union members.
Now Kaukauna is poised to give the unions that, in exchange for some modest increases to their health insurance and pensions. Yet I doubt the state’s NEA affiliate will be celebrating (hat tip: Iain Murray).
For more on public sector unions, see here and here.
Schools in right-to-work states (where unions are weak) are getting better and better over time compared to schools in heavily-unionized states.
As Walter Russell Mead notes in “Blue State Schools: The Shame Of A Nation“:
When it comes to excellence in education, red states rule — at least according to a panel of experts assembled by Tina Brown’s Newsweek. Using a set of indicators ranging from graduation rate to college admissions and SAT scores, the panel reviewed data from high schools all over the country to find the best public schools in the country. The results make depressing reading for the teacher unions: the very best public high schools in the country are heavily concentrated in red states. Three of the nation’s ten best public high schools are in Texas — the no-income tax, right-to-work state that blue model defenders like to characterize as America at its worst. Florida, another no-income tax, right-to-work state long misgoverned by the evil and rapacious Bush dynasty, has two of the top ten schools. Newsweek isn’t alone with these shocking results. Another top public school list, compiled by the Washington Post, was issued in May. Texas and Florida rank number one and number two on that list’s top ten as well … On both lists only one of the top ten public schools was located in a blue state.
Last week, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld a state law limiting collective bargaining with teachers’ unions and other government-employee unions in Wisconsin. To justify collective bargaining, Wisconsin union supporters, such as the Democratic National Committee, had falsely claimed that Virginia, which bans collective bargaining in state agencies, ranks 44th in the nation in ACT/SAT scores, compared to Wisconsin ranking 2nd. In reality, Virginia actually beat Wisconsin in ACT scores in 2010, 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. A law professor noted that “in Virginia, test scores have steadily improved since collective bargaining for teachers was ended.”
If you thought leaving a spouse was tough, just be thankful that you’re not a brewery in need of a divorce from your dead-beat distributor. A recently released video from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy explains how the mandatory three-tier system for alcohol distribution has resulted in an acrimonious relationship between brewers and wholesalers and the deleterious effects it has had on the state’s market.
I have been writing for a while on the many problems stemming from the Prohibition-era system of alcohol distribution which, in most states, requires that producers of alcohol (i.e., distillers, brewers, or wineries) to sell their product to wholesalers/distributors (i.e., middlemen) and then those distributors then sell the products to retailers (i.e., pubs, restaurants, and stores). This means that producers are not allowed to sell their products directly to consumers, restaurants, pubs, or stores: they must sell them to one of a handful of wholesalers operating in their state. Apart from the often unnecessary increase in the producer’s cost of doing business, the requirement gives wholesalers an extraordinary amount of power and influence over producers because in most states breaking such a contract is difficult or impossible, which means that a wholesaler can literally shelve the producers product in their warehouse and the brewer can do very little about it.
In the video, Brett VanderKamp, the president of New Holland Brewing Co., describes the contract that brewers must make with distributors in Michigan as “harder to get out of than a marriage.” That is certainly the case in Massachusetts where small brewers have been lobbying to change the laws. Small brewers who want out of a contract with a distributor often have to go through an expensive legal battle only to take a chance on another wholesaler. Even if the brewery can prove that the wholesaler is failing to get their product on shelves or in restaurants, the cost of the legal battle is often too great for start-up breweries that — even if they manage to break one contract — have no guarantee that the next distributor they find will be any better.
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Government employee unions and their allies have tried just about everything to stop the efforts by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Republicans in the legislature to curb their collective bargaining privileges. Senate Democrats fled the state. Union activists held loud protests for weeks in Madison.
Then, after GOP collective bargaining measure passed, unions and their allies set out to replace a state Supreme Court judge with one likely to strike down the collective bargaining law, to no avail.
Now a liberal activist judge has struck down the collective bargaining law. At first sight, this may seem like a major victory for Wisconsin’s unions, but in fact their quiver is running low.
As The Washington Examiner‘s Philip Klein notes, “The ruling is likely moot, as the issue is expected to be decided by the state’s Supreme Court anyway.” With incumbent Republican Judge David Prosser still on the Court, the union’s prospects there don’t look too bright. (Prosser’s Democrat challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg has until May 31 to decide if she wants to challenge the election result, but even if she does her odds are not good.)
A new bill in the Wisconsin legislature would make the cream puff the state’s official dessert. An influential lobbying group consisting of fourth-graders from Mukwonago used Facebook and other media to pressure Sen. Mary Lazich into introducing the bill.
Despite support from the powerful Wisconsin Bakers Association, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel points that the cream puff bill’s success is not guaranteed. Previous attempts “to make Harley-Davidson the official state motorcycle and to recognize the microbe that turns milk into cheese failed to pass.”
CEI will be paying very close attention to the heated legislative battle in Madison to give the delicious cream puff its due. After all, the time that legislators spend on this bill is time they aren’t spending passing more harmful legislation.
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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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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“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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