Understanding Government

Alex Keefe of WBEZ-Chicago Public Radio reports that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will lay off 625 city workers, “after labor leaders blew a Friday deadline to come up with a list of cost-saving measures in order to avoid pink slips.” Emanuel is dealing with a major municipal deficit and has a legitimate beef with some city workers, who are not making reasonable concessions that would save the city some money. However, Emanuel is the “Scott Walker of Chicago” in who the mayor said he would lay off: city water department call operators, city custodians, seasonal street sweepers.

Exempt from the list are police and fire fighters, even though these professions take up 2/3 of the city’s payroll costs. Like Walker, Emanuel seems to think that police and fire fighters are a more noble kind of public employee than, say, custodians.

Gov. Scott Walker

Wisconsin’s law to limit the collective bargaining power of public employee unions goes into effect this week. Meanwhile, a coalition of Ohio workers has gathered the signatures needed to put a referendum on the ballot in November that would repeal that state’s anti-public employee union bill. And in Chicago, Rahm Emanuel has threatened to lay off 625 unionized city workers if the Chicago Federation of Labor does not make concessions by midnight Thursday.

In each instance, unionized government employees are a targeted victim of legitimately bad government budget situations. Here a couple of early conclusions we can make about these confrontations with public sector workers: (more…)

The big news from Wisconsin yesterday was that the state supreme court upheld the law taking away most collective bargaining rights for state public employees who are neither police nor fire fighters. This is obviously a huge, though expected, victory for Gov. Scott Walker and the state Republican party. One thing to note, though, is that Walker’s anti-government employee agenda has recently met resistance among even Republicans in the state legislature. The legislature rejected a plan to significantly roll back the number of state employees who work on behalf of food stamp and Medicaid recipients. The main result of the anti-public employee union bill may be a backlash on other Walker policies as well.

The Wisconsin state legislature did away with two major attempts by Gov. Scott Walker to privatize local administration of federally-funded social services. Jessica Vanegreen of the Madison Capital Times reports that Walker had wanted to use private workers to run Wisconsin’s food stamp program, Food Share, and also to run Medicaid. Walker’s idea was that residents would no longer apply in person for Food Share or Medicaid services, but instead use hotline numbers. The Obama administration threatened to remove federal funding if these proposals got enacted.

But even when Walker loses, he partly wins. The state legislature did agree to consolidate staff at centers that administer food stamp benefits.

Scott Walker

In March, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker successfully passed through the state legislature what was clearly a law to weaken public employee unions — but what the governor persistently sold as a deficit reduction bill. Now Walker is doing the same with initiatives to weaken environmental regulation, which he suggests are efforts to reduce the state budget deficit and spur economic development. Walker’s actions deserve scrutiny not just for how they affect Wisconsin residents. Other freshmen Republican governors and Congressional Republicans working on national budget issues could follow his lead. (more…)