Can unions reboot for the 21st century?

Marc Eisen:

One can only marvel at how masterfully Gov. Scott Walker gutted Wisconsin's public employee unions. This was deft work, surgically precise in its neutering of 50 years of collective bargaining rights.

Walker tightly limited bargainable items, made union dues voluntary, ended the lifeblood of payroll deductions for dues collection and mandated yearly certification votes for unions trying to represent public workers.

The last item is particularly devilish. To be certified, the union must receive not just a simple majority of the votes, but 51% of the entire workforce, including those who don't bother to vote at all.

Reality check: Walker himself wouldn't be governor today if he had to meet that threshold. Candidate Walker won 52.3% of the vote last November, but that was just 25.8% of the voting-age electorate. David Ahrens, a labor activist, studied the legislative numbers and found that only two of 132 lawmakers reached the 51% threshold and just one in a contested election.

For a lot of people, the Republican crackdown reeked of unfairness. This is a major reason Walker and the GOP legislative majority are nervously playing defense today: They seemed downright thuggish, to use a favorite conservative pejorative, in beating down the unions.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at July 30, 2011 1:44 AM
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