Freedom Line Blog

Arguably, the most important part of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s reforms of public employee unions was instituting an annual vote by members on whether or not to stay.

Two years later, Wisconsin’s unions are reeling.

“Under Governor Walker’s 2001 union-reform law, a majority of union members have to vote each year to recertify the union as their representative. If less than 50% of members vote to keep the union and pay union dues, the union effectively loses its ability to bargain for wages,” says an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

It looks like there’s a rush for the exits.

“A spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state affiliate of the NEA, said recently, ‘It seems like the majority of our affiliates in the state aren’t seeking recertification…’”

To date, 13% of Wisconsin’s school districts and 39 state and municipal units have been decertified since the law went into effect.

Wisconsin’s experience confirms that, when given a choice, many public employees – and especially teachers – don’t see the value of belonging to a union.

Kudos to Governor Walker for giving them a forum to make that choice.

In a speech to a room full of government researchers, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker made some bold predictions: If Detroit had passed the same public union reforms as the Badger State did, it wouldn’t be bankrupt today. And if Chicago had done so, its public school system would be in much better shape.

Walker’s comments are sure to spark controversy from union-friendly Democrats who disdain his rollback of debt-creating privileges. But liberals should get used to the argument because the success of Walker’s program is quietly making him into a viable 2016 presidential contender.

Later this week Walker is hosting the National Governors Association in Milwaukee, and he plans to deliver a simple message: “Worry more about the next generation than the next election.”

Absent Walker’s track record, it would be an empty bromide. But with it, the phrase introduces a formula for success that Americans nationwide may be willing to try after eight years of economic futility under President Barack Obama.

Stay tuned…

In his column last week, Troy identified Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker as perhaps the best potential Republican presidential candidate to correct for Barack Obama’s deficiencies.

In an editorial by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, we have even more proof.

One of Walker’s first acts as governor was to sign into a law a series of big changes on how public employee unions operate. The three biggest were limits on collective bargaining, requiring unions to recertify each year and prohibiting automatic collection of union dues.

According to analysis by the paper, in the two years since the law passed the Milwaukee affiliate of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees “has gone from more than 9,000 members and income exceeding $7 million in 2010 to about 3,500 members and a deep deficit by the end of last year.”

So far Walker’s law has translated into savings of $110 for Milwaukee taxpayers, says a new report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Let’s see, budget-busting president or belt-tightening governor? Maybe, just maybe, America will get to make a sensible choice in 2016.

Ten California public school teachers are suing both the National Education Association (NEA), and its state affiliate, the California Teachers Association (CTA), to block a mandatory $1,000 annual contribution to the union – even though none of the teachers are members of the union.

California’s “fair share” and “agency shop” laws allow CTA, the state’s dominant teachers union, to extract involuntary contributions to fund its activities since non-members are deemed to benefit from the union’s collective bargaining agreements, reports Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner.

The teachers’ lawsuit “claims that NEA and CTA dues fund a Democratic political agenda, not just collective bargaining.” And since the teachers suing don’t agree with that agenda, their coerced dues amount to compelled speech.

In other words, California’s draconian employment tax on non-CTA teachers could be unconstitutional, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s reasoning in Knox v. Service Employees International Union (2012).

Such a ruling could help weaken the CTA’s stranglehold on California politics, and stop its pilfering of non-members’ paychecks.

Stay tuned.

Jason Richwine of Heritage and Andrew Biggs of AEI provide an interesting thought experiment about the disparities between public and private employee compensation:

If public employees are underpaid, they ought to get raises when they switch to the private sector. But they don’t, and that fact is telling.

…

According to the SIPP data, the average federal worker shifting to a private job actually accepts a small salary reduction of around 3 percent. Similarly, private sector workers who move to federal jobs don’t take a pay cut. They get a first-year raise averaging 9 percent, well above the raise other workers get when they switch jobs within the private sector.

SIPP stands for Survey of Income and Program Participation, a Census Bureau dataset that tracks tens of thousands of households over several years as they switch jobs.  Using it above, Richwine and Biggs turn their thought experiment into a cold hard fact: Compensation is better in the public sector.

Think that’s sustainable?

You read that right.

The Daily Caller’s Caroline May reports that the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union demanded and won a ban on any public school event that limits participation to mothers and sons or fathers and daughters, such as traditional dances.

The reason: the events perpetuate “blatant gender stereotypes.”

As usual, the school sponsoring the offending dance was caught in a legal vice grip:

Although the federal Title IX anti-discrimination law does provide exemptions for such events, state law does not, but rather explicitly bans “sex discrimination in ‘…any and all school functions and activities,’” Superintendent of the Cranston Public School System Judith A Lundsten explained in an August letter sent to “Partner Organizations” and posted in full at WPRO News in R.I.

Already, one Republican candidate for Rhode Island state senate, Sean Gately, has made this a campaign issue, promising to introduce an amendment to the state law so that it tracks Title IX to allow exceptions for events like father-daughter dances.

If Gately can figure out a way to make the ACLU reimburse the school district for the hours spent in responding to this wasteful drain on public resources, he should run for governor.

Of course, the main problem with the ACLU in this and other instances is more than the waste of public resources.  It’s making a living by using the law to harass the very society the law was meant to serve.

No one who passed Rhode Island’s version of Title IX intended it to outlaw father-daughter dances.  Had the ACLU’s position been a publicly acknowledged purpose of the legislation when it was proposed, the law’s authors would have been laughed out of the chamber.  Whenever this issue gets a hearing in court – and Gately willing, it will – the reviewing court should do exactly the same to the ACLU’s argument.

Enough of the madness.  If people really want to stop making every argument political and thus polarizing, we must start by making less of our disputes a cause of legal action.

Christian Schneider  writing in City Journal shows the vivid cost/benefit contrast between members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and their public charter school counterparts.  CTU members average $76,000 in annual salary before benefits, while public charter school teachers make $49,000.

Charter school teachers are a bargain.  A study by the Illinois Policy Institute cited by Schneider indicates that nine of Chicago’s top ten performing schools are open-enrollment, non-selective charter high schools.

Faced with this kind of competition, CTU members did what any self-respecting public employee union would do when offered a sixteen percent pay raise in exchange for linking employment to student test results – they went on strike.

Change is coming to all levels of the education industry.  Groups like CTU need to adapt to the new reality of pay-for-performance or risk expulsion from the system.

We’ve all heard horror stories about how difficult it is to fire exceptionally bad public school teachers in large urban districts.  Thanks to a chart (see below) in a new lawsuit challenging California’s teacher tenure law, now we know why.

The parties behind the lawsuit, discussed by Larry Sands in City Journal California, simply ask the California judicial system to make sure “that the policies embodied in the California Code of Education place the interests of students first and promote the goal of having an effective teacher in every classroom.”

Part of achieving that goal may involve requiring every California school district to comply with the Stull Act, a forty-year-old law that mandates using some measure of student learning outcomes in every teacher’s performance evaluation.  You won’t be shocked to discover that this law currently goes unenforced.

That is, unless the lawsuits Sands discusses are successful.  If that happens, students just might start getting the level of education so many of their parents are paying for in taxes.