A resentment of organized labor,
driven in part by its growing reliance on government jobs, is
hurting unions at the ballot box.

“It’s a feeling the unions have been able to be immune to
wage cuts,” said Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial
relations at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
“What they don’t understand is it is a national revolt against
special deals.”

A poll in August showed 52 percent of Americans approved of
labor unions, down from a high of 75 percent in 1957, according
to the Gallup Organization.

The decline in popularity may have contributed to losses
this week in Wisconsin, where a union-backed recall of
Republican Governor Scott Walker failed, and in a pair of
California cities where voters approved measures to restructure
public-employee pensions over the objections of organized labor.

“The perception has been that workers have been given too
good a deal,” Gary Jacobson, a political science professor at
the University of California at San Diego, said of union
workers.

Union leaders attribute their 7 percentage-point loss in
the Wisconsin recall, spurred by Walker’s drive to restrict
collective bargaining of state workers, to his almost $30
million in campaign spending. That was more than nine times what
was spent by his labor-backed opponent, Democratic Milwaukee
Mayor Tom Barrett.

AFSCME Reaction

“We are under attack from anti-worker politicians
bankrolled by billionaires and Wall Street barons,” Gerald McEntee, the president of the 1.6-million member American
Federation of State, County Municipal Employees, said in a
statement.

Blaming the loss on the disparity in spending doesn’t
address the sagging popularity of unions, Chaison said. Union
membership last year slumped to a record low of 11.8 percent of
the American workforce.

That membership is increasingly based in government jobs.
Labor unions represented 6.9 percent of employees at private
companies in 2011, while the rate among public workers was 37
percent, according to the U.S. Labor Department. More than half
of all union jobs are on government payrolls.

In addition to this week’s votes, other states have sought
to strip workers’ rights. Indiana in February adopted a proposal
that allows workers to avoid paying union dues, while Ohio last
year passed legislation to limit collective bargaining. Unions
fought back, winning a referendum that repealed the Ohio law.

Milwaukee Firefighter

Richard Sisson, 56, a retired Milwaukee firefighter, said
some union members supported Walker’s changes because they
helped balance the budget without raising taxes and put the
state on the right fiscal track.

“I can’t say we’re all for Walker, but a good portion of
us are,” Sisson, wearing a red “Firefighters for Walker” T-
shirt, said in an in an interview at Walker’s election-night
party in Waukesha. “Sometimes tough decisions have to be
made.”

A CNN exit poll showed that 28 percent of union members in
Wisconsin voted for Walker and against the recall.

Unions will need to show they are willing to share
sacrifice in bad economic times if they hope to reverse lagging
support, Chaison said. Voters don’t like to see public-sector
workers benefiting as services are cut, he said.

Scapegoats Search

“It’s like a company that is losing money,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor and director of the Center for
the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of
California at Santa Barbara. “It hard to have a good contract
when the company is losing money. They are being squeezed as
people search for scapegoats.”

Alison Omens, spokeswomen for the AFL-CIO, a federation of
U.S. unions with 12 million members, said the workers have
already made sacrifices resulting from downturns in the economy.
Asking them to take further cuts won’t help, she said.

“Entire middle-class and working-class families have made
huge sacrifices in the past decade,” Omens said. “We need to
bring that balance to the country.”

Political attacks “are making public employees look like
they’re ugly and greedy and riding gravy trains,” said Joe
Zammit, 38, a special education teacher at Milwaukee Public
Schools. “They portray teachers as lazy and greedy and it’s
very frustrating.”

Winning a few elections and enunciating the importance of
fair benefits and wages will increase the popularity of labor,
Lichtenstein said.

“They did lose, but within that loss was the generation of
activists were created,” said Lichtenstein. “That’s not to be
sniffed at.”

To contact the reporter on this story:
William McQuillen in Washington at
bmcquillen@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Jon Morgan at
jmorgan97@bloomberg.net

Enlarge image

Unions Seen Paying at Ballot Box for Dependence on Public Sector

Andy Manis/Getty Images

The decline in popularity may have contributed to losses this week in Wisconsin, where a union-backed recall of Republican Governor Scott Walker failed.

The decline in popularity may have contributed to losses this week in Wisconsin, where a union-backed recall of Republican Governor Scott Walker failed. Photographer: Andy Manis/Getty Images

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“We aren’t going to go away. We’re not going to pull a blanket over our head and pee in our pajamas.”

Marty Beil, executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, talking to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about the loss of the power to strike and force state workers to pay dues.

The Wall Street Journal today reports that the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the largest part of the AFL-CIO, has been shedding members even faster than overall public-sector job losses.

The cycle for five decades has been that unions support the campaigns of Democrats who promise to expand the power of unions. Thus empowered, the unions have more money with which to elect more Democrats who further expand union powers. And so it goes.

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A 50,000-member drop from March 2011 to February 2010 may not sound like a big deal for an organization that boasts 1.37 million members and is surpassed in size only by the Service Employees International Union, which represents service workers, such as busboys and hospital orderlies, as well as government workers.

But this is a very big deal as it relates to the next decade of American politics. After decades of growth, the most important part of the Democratic coalition – unionized government workers – has started to slide.

The decline comes from several sources.

First, the overall decline in the number of government jobs – a decline of about 1 percent nationally. While it may not be easy to fire an AFSCME member from a civil service position, it may be possible that state and local lawmakers have allowed attrition to hit harder in job categories with high union membership.

But there is also a growing effort in jurisdictions across the country to reduce the power of the group and other government-worker collectives – most importantly, the power to force government workers to pay dues.

In Wisconsin Tuesday, voters spared Gov. Scott Walker from a labor-led effort to remove him for office for having enacted a crackdown on government unions. Much of the discussion in the state and nationally was about the end, after 50 years, of the power of collective bargaining (i.e. to go on strike) for state workers.

Wisconsin led the nation in expanding such powers, and now has curtailed them. Prior to the middle of the last century it was considered inappropriate by most to give those paid by taxpayers and already protected by civil service regulations the additional power to shut down public services in a contract dispute.

That’s mostly a philosophical argument, though. Yes, the power to go on strike may have driven higher pay and better benefits for some workers, but most of the gains in those regards have come not by workers picketing, but through politicians pocketing contributions.

The biggest practical effect of Walker’s law, and the ones that preceded it and succeeded it around the nation, comes not in collective bargaining but in mandatory dues payments. Prior to Walker’s law, the state acted as an agent for AFSCME and other unions, automatically collecting dues directly from worker paychecks.

Whether a government worker opted to join the union or not, the money came out. Unions defend the practice of compulsory dues payments on the grounds that if dues were optional, workers would opt out in droves and sap the power of the organization.

It turns out that they were right. For the AFSCME local in Wisconsin that covers many of the state workers, membership dropped nearly 70 percent in the first year under Walker’s law. Formerly forced to share their salaries with the union, government workers opted to keep the dough instead.  

Even as AFSCME, SEIU and others have been racking up new members in jurisdictions with liberal laws regarding government worker unions, like California, Illinois and New York, the tide is going out in Wisconsin, Indiana, Florida and other places with more conservative laws.

This is a big deal for Democrats. While President Obama is able to raise plenty of money for himself by tapping well-heeled Democrats on Wall Street, in the entertainment industry and elsewhere, Democrats from county clerks to U.S. senators will need billions of dollars over the next decade to stay in power. You can’t get elected superintendent of schools by raffling off dinner with George Clooney. You need the money that comes from the dues paid by the teachers whom you oversee.

The cycle for five decades has been that unions support the campaigns of Democrats who promise to expand the power of unions. Thus empowered, the unions have more money with which to elect more Democrats who further expand union powers. And so it goes.

Or, so it went.

The lousy economy, looming pension problems and frustration with the nation’s unionized educational system have prompted voters to look afresh at how much power such unions should have. The shattered budgets in states and localities have prompted desperation so severe that even some Democrats are willing to buck the unions.

Democrats rake in huge sums as an indirect subsidy from taxpayers. You pay your property tax, your property tax funds county government payrolls, your county government gives a slice of that money to AFSCME and AFSCME gives some to like-minded politicians to stay in office.

So lucrative has this cycle been that Democrats could hardly function today without compulsory dues payments for state and local government workers. But after a half-century of government union growth, the decline has begun.

This is bad news for organized labor overall, which has seen private-sector membership collapse in the past three decades and relied increasingly on public-sector dues payments. But it is even worse news for Democrats.

Unions are looking for new models of viability – organizing low-skill workers, focusing on new immigrants, etc. But Democrats have come to rely so heavily on the party’s symbiosis with government-worker unions, an accelerating decline in the fiscal crisis facing so much of the nation would prove disastrous.

And Now, A Word About Charles

In honor of the first birthday of “Power Play with Chris Stirewalt” on live.foxnews.com  Charles Krauthammer has agreed to join the show for the full half hour, entertain viewer questions and provide general excellence. The show starts at 11:30 am EDT. Please join the fun.

 

Chris Stirewalt is digital politics editor for Fox News, and his POWER PLAY column appears Monday-Friday on FoxNews.com.

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