Their howls of protest notwithstanding, Wisconsin Democrats \u2013 whenever they gain control of state government again \u2013 are likely to retain Republican Governor Scott Walker\u2019s ban on collective bargaining by public employees.<\/p>\n
The Manhattan Institute\u2019s Josh Barro explains that Democrats in Wisconsin are about to learn the joys of writing their own budgets<\/a>; just like their peers in other states and the federal government.<\/p>\n For this reason, I am skeptical of Democrats\u2019 vigorous hopes to retake Wisconsin\u2019s government and repeal this new law. There is no clamor among Democrats in Virginia to give collective-bargaining privileges to public workers, nor have Democrats in Washington, D.C., shown much interest in empowering federal workers\u2019 unions. This is because Democratic officeholders, quite rationally, prefer to write their budgets themselves, rather than hand over control of employee-compensation costs to unions. Once Wisconsin lawmakers get used to the new status quo, I think this is likely to be true there, too \u2014 why would mayors, school-board members, and state legislators want to give up a powerful<\/a> new budgeting tool they\u2019ve been given?<\/p>\n Eventually, Democrats will take power in Wisconsin again, and when they do I think they are likely to restore the \u201cdues checkoff\u201d \u2014 automatic deductions from public payrolls to pay union dues, eliminated in the just-passed bill. But I think they are likely to find the federal model of limited collective bargaining pretty useful, just as Barack Obama has. Under pressure from municipal officials, Wisconsin Democrats will be more likely to \u201creform\u201d this law while retaining significant constraints on bargaining than to repeal it entirely.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Their howls of protest notwithstanding, Wisconsin Democrats \u2013 whenever they gain control of state government again \u2013 are likely to retain Republican Governor Scott Walker\u2019s ban on collective bargaining by public employees. The Manhattan Institute\u2019s Josh Barro explains that Democrats in Wisconsin are about to learn the joys of writing their own budgets; just like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[70,2419,506,1032,1947,761,2412,1500],"class_list":["post-8855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-budget","tag-collective-bargaining","tag-democrats","tag-josh-barro","tag-manhattan-institute","tag-public-employee-unions","tag-scott-walker","tag-wisconsin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8856,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8855\/revisions\/8856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}