Last year, the Republicans in Wisconsin passed the most sweeping and controversial legislation in many a decade, the bill that ended collective bargaining for most state employees.  The reverberations of the legislation go on, and the upcoming recall elections may be seen by many as an opportunity to restore worker rights in the state.  In fact, the election, important as it is, provides no such opportunity, and the closest that Wisconsin voters will ever get to having an election that revolves around the collective bargaining issue came and went with this week’s Democratic primary.
Scott Walker did not run on a platform of ending collective bargaining.  It is a matter of dispute whether he barely mentioned it or did not mention it at all when he was running for governor, but it can safely be said that collective bargaining was not a key issue in the 2010 gubernatorial race.

More surprisingly, the issue won’t be much discussed in the recall elections either.  The ads so far have all been about the economy.  Barrett ads emphasize that Wisconsin has suffered the worst job losses of any state in the country over the last year.  Republican ads will tout the increase in Milwaukee’s unemployment rate since Barrett became mayor.  Nobody is talking about collective bargaining.

It’s very odd.  The months of demonstrations in Madison, the entire impetus for the recall effort — it was all about collective bargaining rights.  But now that the recall race is in full swing, the issue has snuck off and vanished.  Why?  I think it is because the issue is settled.  Collective bargaining is gone and won’t be coming back.

There are a lot of reasons for that.  One is that with Republicans controlling the State Assembly, there is no prospect of repealing last year’s legislation.  And with the Republican redistricting now in place, there is no prospect of Democrats controlling the State Assembly any time in the next decade.

Also, Barrett is not known as a friend of the unions.  While protests were in high gear in Madison, Barrett was keeping a low profile in Milwaukee.  And, the dirty little secret is that if Barrett becomes governor, he will probably be grateful to Scott Walker for getting rid of the unions.  Barrett will have budgets to balance as well, and he isn’t going to get tax increases through a Republican legislature.  It’s going to be a tough job, and getting the unions out of the picture makes it a little less tough.

I believe, though, that the deepest reason why collective bargaining is no longer being debated is that Republicans have won the argument, and I want to examine the case they made, and why it has worked.

The fundamental argument against public employee unions is actually plausible.  The argument is that unions funnel money to their candidates who, if elected, then return the favor by approving overly generous contracts.  When the union’s candidates are finally defeated, the good government party steps in to end this corruption.  

That is the argument that the Republicans have used, and I think it’s been accepted by the majority of the public.  This is in spite of the fact that it bears no resemblance to anything that actually occurred in Wisconsin.  For the last 50 years, the Wisconsin legislators, both Democrats and Republicans, have routinely been approving contracts negotiated with public employee unions.  The provisions of these contracts were never controversial until Scott Walker politicized the process.

The second reason that the Republicans won this issue has to do with the Wisconsin economy in general.  Wisconsin was one of the states that had a strong manufacturing sector, and that sector has been in decline for decades.  A lot those jobs used to be union jobs, and those jobs have gone to Asia or Latin America.  The manufacturing jobs that remain have survived only because unions made huge concessions in order to keep the factories from closing down.  So the good union job, which used to be commonplace in the Wisconsin economy, is largely a thing of the past.  Most workers have lousy health plans that they pay a lot of money for.  They probably don’t have a retirement plan at all.  Now the argument the Republicans use is this:  “The teachers, they have a nice pension plan, and they get the summers off besides.  And who is paying for it?  You are!  You don’t have your own pension plan, but you are contributing to somebody else’s, somebody who doesn’t even work the whole year!”  So, the Republicans have been able to capitalize on the resentment of a lot of underpaid Wisconsin workers.

Finally, the Republicans have been successful for a reason that would not have occurred to me — the negative feelings that people harbor toward teachers.  When collective bargaining was revoked for most state workers, the police and fire fighters were excluded.  I thought at the time that that was because police and fire fighter unions are more likely to contribute to Republican candidates than other public employee unions, but there is a deeper reason for the exclusion.  Police and fire fighters are popular.  Teachers are a different story.  Most adults have horrible memories of school.  Education consists of large stretches of boredom punctuated by the periodic imposition of anxiety and humiliation.  All orchestrated by teachers.  Students hate their teachers most of the time.  Parent don’t like teachers either.  The teachers aren’t doing enough for their kids.  Or the teachers are telling the kids stuff that undermines what the parents are telling them at home.  Going on the offensive against teachers was a real winner for Scott Walker.

I don’t think Tom Barrett will defeat Scott Walker next month, but even if he does, it will be a pyrrhic sort of victory.  The election that mattered was in 2010, and the effects of that election will always be with us in Wisconsin.