latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-union-power-20110219,0,7936885.story
Labor union stronghold rethinking its position
The bill proposed in Wisconsin to remove collective bargaining rights from
government workers is similar to measures advancing in other Rust Belt states.
Such battles are part of a nationwide backlash.
By Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times
7:58 PM PST, February 18, 2011
The nation's Rust Belt once ran on union power, its factories and steel mills
employing Democratic-voting union members who got regular pay raises and good
pensions. Now the region is at the vanguard of a national backlash against
organized labor, as newly elected Republican governors and legislatures try to
control costs by weakening — or virtually eliminating — unions of government
workers.
In Wisconsin on Friday, there was no end in sight to an impasse
that paralyzed state government, as Democratic legislators vowed to stay out of
the state to defeat an attempt by Gov. Scott Walker to remove collective
bargaining rights from government workers. Tens of thousands of protesters
continued to throng the state Capitol.
The upshot is a pitched battle
between the old base of the Democratic Party — organized labor — and the new
base of the Republican Party — the fiscally conservative, small-government
activists who drove the GOP to success in the November election.
Nearly
identical measures are advancing in Ohio and Iowa, while Michigan and Indiana
are exploring other ways of limiting protections for unionized government
workers. All this is happening in states that have been hit hard both by the
recession and the loss of union jobs over the decades.
"What happened is
the destruction of private-sector unionism in the Rust Belt — the [level] of
private-sector unionism in Wisconsin and Ohio is what it used to be in
Mississippi," said Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of
Work, Labor and Democracy at UC Santa Barbara.
Most remaining union
members are government employees, whose standards of living haven't fallen like
their private-sector counterparts. "Now there's a social resentment,"
Lichtenstein said. "When there are only scattered islands of unionism, they
stand out."
President Obama, who has clashed with teachers unions and
other government unions, has thrown in behind organized labor in this battle.
Prominent Republicans — including House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and
former Minnesota governor and possible presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty —
have slammed Obama and backed Walker.
"We're seeing a test of how serious
the public at large is willing to go along with the Tea Party Express," said
John Gilliom, a political science professor at Ohio University. "It's a live
political science experiment."
That's what drew Obama into the fight. His
campaign operation, now known as Organizing for America, has been coordinating
with union leaders protesting the bill in Wisconsin and those battling similar
proposals elsewhere in the Midwest.
The stakes are high for the
president, whose party was routed in the region during the Republican tidal wave
in November. He needs critical swing states like Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin to
win reelection. And if those states' remaining unions are decimated, analysts
say, that will be much harder.
"Unions are the backbone of the Democratic
Party," Lichtenstein said. "Their destruction in the Rust Belt would mean those
states would be red like Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas."
Across the country,
governors of both parties are battling public employee unions to win concessions
on pay, benefits and, most significantly, pension contributions. There are
undeniable financial pressures: States face as much as $6 trillion in pension
liabilities to government workers, whose unions negotiated generous pension
benefits in lieu of high salaries over the decades.
Either taxpayers will
have to foot that bill or union members will have to take a haircut, said Robert
Novy-Marx, who studies government pensions at the University of Rochester. "So
the unions are representing interests that are diametrically opposed to the
taxpayers."
The tension is developing as the public's perception of
unions is at its lowest level in 25 years. A poll from the Pew Research Center
released this week found only 45% of Americans had a positive view of organized
labor.
But Pew's Carroll Doherty noted that 61% still believe unions are
needed to improve working people's lives and that a plurality favors unions over
governments in labor disputes.
In Wisconsin, however, surveys have shown
that more than 60% think public-sector unions should make concessions on
benefits and pensions. Analysts elsewhere say there is similar resentment
simmering across much of the Rust Belt, where unemployment is sky-high and where
private-sector union workers have made concessions to keep their
jobs.
People who lost jobs are not happy "seeing their taxes spent on a
work force that many see as oversized, inefficient and in need of reform," said
Scott Watkins, a senior consultant at the Anderson Economic Group in East
Lansing, Mich.
Unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere say that they're willing
to make concessions, but that approaches like Walker's go too far by virtually
dissolving organized labor in government.
Walker's proposal would force
government workers to pay half their pension costs and 12% of their health
costs. Most significantly, it would also bar them from collective bargaining and
prevent government workers from getting raises above inflation without approval
in a public referendum. Every year, union members would vote on whether the
union could continue. These changes would not apply to state troopers, police or
firefighters.
Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the
University of Wisconsin, said that while the public agrees with Walker on the
need for concessions, "my impression is there's much less support for
de-unionizing the state."
Franklin said that proposition will be put to
the test as neither side in Wisconsin seems ready to give in. Democrats say
they'll stay out of state for weeks if needed to force changes in Walker's
proposal. The governor says he won't back down.
"It's a real political
dilemma now," Franklin said.
nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times