Wisconsin message is a wake-up call
The ground shook a bit last week when the votes were counted in the Wisconsin recall election, but not in the way overwrought media analysts are spinning it.
Democrat Howard Dean, appearing on MSNBC, said “this is the beginning of the undermining of American democracy.”
Republican Sara Palin, appearing on Fox, proclaimed “Obama's goose is cooked.”
Neither, of course, is close to being correct.
Make no mistake, the inability of organized labor to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is a big deal. In a year of unprecedented attacks on unions, labor chose to make a stand in the progressive bastion of Wisconsin. Yet here, in the first state to allow public employee unions, voters retained the man who dismantled collective bargaining rights for those public employees.
The result is not a precursor of November's presidential election. It's way too early and there were way too many other factors involved in this intense but local scrap. At the same time voters were pulling the lever for Republican Walker, they told pollsters they favored Obama over Romney by a 51-to 45-percent margin.
It's a triumph of the idea that government spending has run amok.
Voters in Wisconsin — and in municipal elections in two of California's largest cities — said they won't continue to tolerate inaction on public employee compensation schemes that are making impossible the continued functioning of core government services.
It's a lesson that should resonate in New York and New Jersey, where new governors are playing hardball with public employee unions, and here in Connecticut, where a pro-labor governor has been pulling his punches.
The central problem is that any negotiation between long-term public employees and short-term elected managers is unfairly tilted. Politicians routinely sell out the long-term interests of taxpayers in favor of short-term electoral support. Unions gladly play along, offering political support and a share of their mandatory dues, at least until the situation becomes unsustainable.
Governor Walker took one approach. He got tough with work rules that were built for abuse and saved the state millions. But his coup was in ending the 'closed shop,' freeing state employees to just say 'no' to mandatory dues. And they did. More than half of the Wisconsin members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union have dropped out. So have a third of the American Federation of Teachers members in the state.
Even union members know the situation is untenable. Fully 37 percent of union households voted for Walker, exit polls show.
On the left coast, voters in San Diego and San Jose took a different approach, approving tough plans to slash pension benefits for municipal employees. And it wasn't even close. Left-leaners could dismiss the two-thirds of conservative San Diego voters who approved; it's harder to discount the 70 percent who approved in San Jose, just down the road from the true-blue epicenter of San Francisco. Unions vow to fight on in the courts but the message seems clear.
Given that Connecticut political affairs seem to be running about five years behind California's experience — and estimates of the state's unfunded obligation top $30 billion plus untold local obligations to municipal employees — there's a message here for Governor Malloy and his team.
The June 5 election results offer two roadmaps for chewing into the public pension situation that is sinking Connecticut. Neither is going to sit well with the public employee unions but either — or both — would please taxpayers.
There's room for Governor Malloy to do some creative mixing to find a uniquely Nutmeg State answer. But find an answer he must or voters will find another way to do it, as they've done now in Wisconsin and in two major cities on the verge of bankruptcy.
Governor, the ball is still in your court.
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