By GREGORY N. HEIRES
Gov. Scott Walker’s strong rebuff of the union-backed recall effort in Wisconsin has provoked soul-searching within the labor movement and the progressive community.
Union supporters call the Wisconsin defeat a triumph of the power of money over people power. Many Washington insiders and political experts say Walker’s huge funding advantage over his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, was simply too great for a grassroots electoral army to defeat.
But in a presidential election year at a time when conservatives are waging unprecedented attacks on public employees, labor leaders and activists pledge that they will not back down.
They hope to build on the Wisconsin mobilization to help re-elect President Barack Obama, who tweeted his support for Barrett on the eve of the election, and set back the conservative agenda of suppressing young, senior and minority voters, curtailing women’s rights, defunding public schools and universities, bankrupting and busting unions and gutting public employee pensions and benefits.
Defending workers’ rights
After the recall vote, Gerald W. McEntee, the outgoing president of AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said: “Although we didn’t win, Wisconsin’s working families sent a loud and clear message to anti-worker governors and their shady corporate backers: Efforts to destroy workers’ rights will not go unchallenged.
“We will take them on, just as we did in Ohio, where we overturned Gov. Kasich’s anti-collective bargaining bill, and in Florida, where we successfully stood up to Gov. Scott’s privatization efforts.” He noted that in Wisconsin, the union knocked out a Republican senator, giving Democrats control of the state Senate.
A week after the election, the AFL-CIO announced a huge drive aimed at registering half a million new union voters in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada, which are crucial for Obama’s re-election.
Immediately after the recall vote, some right-wing pundits went as far as to argue that unions are dead.
Indiana’s Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels said public employees shouldn’t even have the right to unionize. Walker faced the recall because of his support of a new law that stripped Wisconsin’s public service workers of their right to collective bargaining, but he has not – yet – backed legislation to ban them from joining unions.
Beyond elections
Brooklyn College political science professor Immanuel Ness said he feared that Wisconsin is a sign of a deepening attack on the living standards of working families.
Productivity and household income rose by 102 percent between 1947 and 1972, a period of high unionization. But since then, productivity has increased while wages stagnate and decrease.
“Unions will need to use more routes than just the electoral route,” said Ness, a member of the Professional Staff Congress, which represents City University of New York faculty.
“The Wisconsin fight provided a spark for the labor movement, because we’re organizing more than we have in the past,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said.
This is a revised version of an article that originally appeared in the July-August 2012 edition of Public Employee Press, the official publication of DC 37, AFSCME (AFL-CIO), representing 120,000 public employees in the City of New York.
