CHAPTER 4

Super-Size It

On November 19, a few weeks after that eye-popping budget briefing, I traveled to San Diego for the annual meeting of the Republican Governors Association. At that meeting, I spent a lot of time with Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. Our discussions proved to be a critical turning point in my thinking about how to address the budget crisis in Madison.

Since taking office in 2005, Mitch had been a whirlwind of reform. He made tough decisions to close an $800 million deficit, pushed through controversial plans to adopt daylight saving time, and privatized Indiana’s toll roads. I was particularly interested in learning more about one of his first acts as governor, when he eliminated collective bargaining for state employees. I wanted to hear everything he had learned from his experience with collective bargaining in Indiana—how he did it, how his opponents responded, and what the results had been.

Mitch told me his reforms had been a huge success. Eliminating collective bargaining saved taxpayers buckets of money, he said, but those savings were only the secondary benefit. The primary benefit was the flexibility to make state government perform better.

None of the hundreds of operational reforms he enacted during his two terms in office—from consolidating state agencies to privatizing toll roads—would have been possible if he had been required to put each decision through excruciating negotiations and compromises with the unions. Getting rid of collective bargaining freed him to act—to downsize government offices, shift workers from one job to another, and to make dysfunctional agencies functional again.

By the time he faced reelection, Mitch said, he had dozens of examples of agencies that were working better. The Department of Motor Vehicles, which most everyone hated when he took office, was soon rated the best in the United States and Canada. The same was true of other government agencies. Collective bargaining reform had not only helped him balance Indiana’s state budget, it had also freed him to deliver services more efficiently to the taxpayers. Indiana voters recognized it and overwhelmingly elected him to a second term. During the campaign, his opponents were able to say a lot of things about him, but nobody was able to say, “The state government’s a mess.”

Mitch told me that he really hesitated over his decision on collective bargaining—and he was not one to dally. He said he had a mental view of mass protests erupting, and major opposition from the public-worker unions—the kinds of things that neither of us at that moment could have imagined would soon grip Wisconsin.

When he finally issued his executive order, he said he was surprised that it had caused so little a stir. It ended up being one of the least controversial decisions he had made as governor. Putting Indiana on daylight savings time had sparked a far greater public uproar. I’d have to evaluate for myself what the reaction in Wisconsin would be if I went ahead, he told me.

I knew Mitch’s situation was different from ours in several respects. For one thing, his reforms applied only to state workers. I knew I was not going to be able to save enough money if I only eliminated collective bargaining for state employees. We were going to have to cut over a billion dollars in aid to schools and local governments. If they were going to make up for the lost assistance from the state, we would have to take what Mitch did and super-size it. We would have to free not just the state, but also counties, municipalities, and school districts from collective bargaining rules as well.

Mitch was also blessed by the fact that Governor Evan Bayh had instituted collective bargaining in 1989 by executive order. That meant he could eliminate it simply by issuing a new executive order. The deed was done with one swift stroke, before his opponents had time to organize protests, order signs, or rent buses and trailers to encircle his state capitol. Later, when the unions did just that to the state capitol in Madison, I joked that if I could have opened a desk drawer and found an executive order to reverse as Mitch had, I would have done it in a heartbeat.

I knew that if I decided to move forward, I would have to pass legislation. And based on my experience with the unions in Milwaukee County, I knew I would probably face a bigger push back than Mitch had faced (though I never imagined how much bigger).

Mitch gave me some advice: First, he said, whatever you decide to do, go big, go bold, and strike fast. If you have hard things to do, he said, do them as soon as you think they’re right—because the sooner you act, the more time your reforms will have to work. You want as much time as possible for good results to show themselves, and for people to put an event in perspective. If I thought I knew what the right thing to do was, he said, I should do it quickly.

Second, he told me to remember that political capital is not something you spend, it’s something you invest—and properly invested, it brings a return. When you make bold reforms and people see that they worked, they will give your next big idea a little more credence.

Third, he said, always have that next big idea ready. Never stop reforming. Some of your proposals will stall out, and there will always be folks who will not agree with you on everything you do. But people will come to see you as an innovator—someone with good ideas who is constantly trying to make things better. Moreover, if you’re constantly innovating, your opponents will constantly be responding. When people disagree or throw rocks, better that they are responding to your agenda rather than setting one for you.

That advice in particular resonated with me. I was in the Wisconsin legislature in the 1990s when Tommy Thompson was governor. Tommy was constantly putting forward the next reform—welfare reform, tax reform, education reform. He was always several steps ahead of the opposition, and they could never catch up. As soon as they organized to try to stop one of his reforms, he’d have passed it and would be on to the next big thing.

The more I spoke with Mitch over the course of the weekend, the more I learned about how his reforms had worked, and the more confident I became that similar reforms could succeed in Wisconsin.

Leaving that meeting in San Diego, I was ready to get rid of collective bargaining.

Then something happened that confirmed the need for bold action.