The Wisconsin Affair

            The kerfluffle in Wisconsin has some elements to it that would be hard to include in a work of fiction because they’d rob it of credibility.  For example, while the long-range forecast for the state’s budget (from 2013 forward) clearly isn’t good, the expected shortfall for the next budget—the one that has Governor Walker and his Rebublican minions chirping “We’re broke”—is a rather minor 137 million.  The part we couldn’t put in a novel is that 117 million of that shortfall is the result of tax cuts the Governor gave to big business.  So, the “crisis” that requires shutting down public sector unions is one in fact created by a private sector giveaway.

            Then there is the matter of police and firefighter unions.  Best I can figure, police and firefighters qualify as public sector employeees.  Ergo, unions representing them would be public sector unions.  Both of those unions are, however, exempted from the Governor’s wrath.  He fully intends to continue collectively bargaining with them.

            The question that begs is obvious.  If teachers and public health workers and highway department personnel and all the rest of the bloodsuckers nursing at the public teat are what have to be curbed to keep Wisconsin from being “broke,” why not police and firefighters?

            The snarky among us might venture the notion that Tea Partiers like Walker are more enamored of people who can legally carry guns or wield large, sharp axes than they are nerds carrying textbooks or wearing pocket protectors.  The cynics among us would simply point to the fact that the police union and firefighter union were the only two public sector unions that did not openly support Walker’s opponent in the 2010 election.

            But here’s the tap dance that has gone on in Wisconsin, but gone on just as strongly in Indiana, Ohio and just about every other red state.  It starts off as a very aggressive triple time step: public sector employees are overpaid!  But then the unwashed whose mouths that canard issues from are slapped in the face with statistics that show in just about every area where there is a private sector equivalent, the private sector earns markedly more.  Ask any lawyer in a District Attorney’s office how he likes tooling around in his Mercedes and he’ll point to the Altima in the parking lot that belongs to him.   Ask any civil engineer in the highway department how he likes living in a gated community next to his Halliburton neighbor and he’ll point to the two bedroom ranch on a thousand square foot lot he calls home.

            That usually slows the tap dance to a double time step, the gist of which is that you have to factor in the health insurance and life insurance and guaranteed pensions that public employees rake in.  “Now who makes the most” quoth the conservatives?  Fair question that, except for one thing.  Whatever “fringes” public employees receive were gained through collective bargaining—meaning the legislators that are now screaming “off with their benefits” are the same legislators who agreed to the benefits in the first place.   They are also the same legislators who could trim those benefits by revisiting the collective bargaining process—as in fact had happened in Wisconsin before Walker decided to play union buster.

            Okay, so now we’re down to a single time step but those of us whose ears are still offended can take the discussion a step further.  For years—hell, for decades—nationwide, the recruiting pitch used by public sector employers always—repeat, always—included this statement: “we know the salary’s not competitive, but the fringes are really good.”  If the tap dancers have their way, one of two things will result.  Public employee salaries will need to go up considerably, or filling public employee job slots—like teachers, for example—will become way harder than now, and it isn’t easy now.  A little factoid here is illuminating: since 1990, over 40% of the people entering the teaching profession in the k-12 area were in the bottom third of college students based on SAT scores.  That’s not an argument for how excellent the teaching our children are getting is, but it is an indication of what teacher salaries—even including benefits—are attracting.

            Teachers clearly have never been important to Tea Partiers, or to most hard core conservatives, but what about the lawyers charged with the “Law” part of  “Law and Order?”  What about the engineers charged with insuring that dams and bridges are safe?  What about the nurses who make the emergency rooms in federal, state and municipal hospitals functional?

            At this point, the tap dancers usually slow down to f-lap, f-lap, f-lap because the fact of the matter is, government can’t operate without public sector employees, and while the 5% of the country that lives in mindless Tea Party land think a world without government would be nirvana, the rest of us realize that what makes our lives civil and sociable and livable is the  web of services and protections that only government can provide.

            Actually, nirvana is probably too advanced a concept for most Tea Partiers.  A better “perfect world” pix for them would probably be something like a bass boat with a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

            What would ultimately preclude making a novel of the Wisconsin Affair, however, is the way it ends.  Stifled by Democratic senators who spirited themselves next door to Illinois, and faced with angry crowds occupying the legislature’s building in protest, the Republicans found themselves in a quandary.  They couldn’t pass the union-busting bill because they couldn’t get a quorum, and they couldn’t back away from their bill without admitting what was obvious to everyone anyway—that busting the union had nothing to fixing the budget.  What to do?

            Well, apparently in Wisconsin a quorum is needed in a legislative body only to vote on bills that include money.  What sharp knives Walker and his lemmings are is perhaps indicated by the fact that it took them nearly two weeks to realize that, but when the light went on, they moved swiftly.  So swiftly in fact that the move took place in the wee hours of the morning; they simply stripped all the language dealing with union busting out of the original bill and used it to write a whole new bill that contained not one mention of money—and could therefore be voted on without Democrats present.

            But, a perceptive reader would surely point out, if busting the union can be done completely independently of any action rectifying the budget crisis, it would seem not to have much to do with that crisis—either in its creation or in its remedy.  If Wisconsin is no closer to shrinking its budget shortfall for the next fiscal year now than it was before the union busting bill was passed, other than busting the union, what purpose did that bill serve?

            Actually, as I’ve been re-reading this blog, I think its central premise may be wrong.  You actually could write a book about the Wisconsin Affair.  The story lends itself beautifully to farce, and if the writer has even a touch of a mean streak, it could easily turn it into satire.