AMONG THE FORCES OF the left pushing the progressive agenda, few are more politically powerful than government unions like SEIU, AFSCME, and the National Education Association, which is the largest labor union in the United States. These government unions are the most important funding base of the Democratic Party and provide the lion’s share of its troops. Government unions spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year supporting the Democratic Party and its electoral campaigns and agitating for their cause: for bigger government and higher taxes to expand their labor pool and increase its benefits. Their radical leadership was on full display in 2011 when Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who was facing a state budget crisis, attempted to rein in their excesses. Walker proposed a “budget repair bill” that would limit their collective bargaining rights to wages, ask government workers to pay slightly more for their existing health care and pension benefits, and give union members the right to decide every year whether they wanted to belong to a union or not. The bill was also designed to end the process by which union dues were automatically deducted from state employees’ paychecks, depriving them of the freedom to say no.
The unions responded by dispatching 5,000 of their members—teachers, prison guards, and other public-sector employees—to descend on the Wisconsin capitol, barricade themselves inside, and foment a riot. Union goons broke windows and shouted threats of physical violence at legislators who had to pass through their gauntlet to do the work that Wisconsin voters had elected them to do. Walker was called a “fascist,” as were other Republican lawmakers. The unions also mounted a campaign of harassment and intimidation throughout the state. Businesses that failed to back their opposition to Walker’s bill were threatened with public boycotts.1 One disgruntled teachers’ union member sent death threats to 15 Republican legislators, in which she chillingly warned, “Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your families will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks.”2 Republican state senator Glenn Grothman received a note under his office door that read, “THE ONLY GOOD Republican is a DEAD Republican.”3 To block a vote on the bill by preventing a quorum, Democratic legislators fled the state and went into hiding. The disruptions in the capitol lasted three weeks. Damage resulting from the union-led riots came to nearly $8 million.4 As a result of his battles with the government unions, Governor Walker had to withstand two recall votes. Only his fortitude made it possible to thwart the unions’ attempt to nullify the wishes of the Wisconsin voters who had elected him.
While government unions are the fastest-growing sector of a labor movement otherwise in decline, they are a fairly recent phenomenon. As late as 1960, there was not a single recognized union in the federal government. This absence was due to the fact that most politicians, and indeed most labor leaders, originally opposed collective bargaining in the public sector as an impossible conflict of interest and a threat to public safety. Although a supporter of private-sector unions, President Franklin Roosevelt opposed unions for government workers. In 1937, Roosevelt insisted that “meticulous attention should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government. . . . The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”5
The ability of government unions to act politically represents an unacceptable conflict of interest. Government unions can raise slush funds for candidates and elect those who promise to raise their member’s wages and provide them with lucrative benefit packages paid for by taxpayers. Pensions for government workers wrung as concessions from politicians afraid to resist their demands, however unreasonable, are today one of the most crushing burdens on local and state governments. At the same time, the justification for government unions is not at all obvious, since government workers, unlike workers in the private sector, can vote to retire officials who treat them unfairly.
Not surprisingly, since the leaders of government unions are far to the political left, labor expert Matthew Vadum has observed,
The labor movement’s reigning ideology has changed dramatically over the decades. Seventy-five years ago, organized labor was a strongly patriotic force, and so allergic to radicalism that it purged its ranks of the communists who had secretly been trying to seize control of its movement. Today’s unions are run almost exclusively by left-wing radicals, socialists, and communists. Lane Kirkland, the AFL-CIO leader who collaborated with President Ronald Reagan in providing assistance to Poland’s Solidarity movement and in other anticommunist causes, would likely turn over in his grave at the behavior of his successors, John Sweeney and Richard Trumka. Embracing the use of anti-American rhetoric in setting out their foreign and domestic policy positions, Sweeney and Trumka helped government unions transform the labor movement into a stalking horse for leftism.6
That there has been no Republican legislation to outlaw government unions and restore the democratic system to health is another result of Republican Party fecklessness and its failure to take seriously the stakes should the left’s agenda prevail. Yet there are courageous Republicans like Scott Walker who have demonstrated the will to stand up to them. Perhaps his example will inspire other Republicans to do likewise.