Maybe it’s a cry for help. We’ve seen it before when communities have been terrorized by insane serial killers in the grips of an insatiable bloodlust. A chilling message arrives from another out-of-control psychopath: “Stop me before I kill again!”
More likely, though, it’s just the next underhanded move by right-wing Wisconsin Republicans who’ve learned that the best way to wreck the laws of this state is to spring their most vicious ideas on voters after elections, not before.
Four years ago, Gov. Scott Walker and his Republican legislative cronies waited until post-election to reveal their secret plan to destroy collective bargaining rights for public employees. Almost immediately after the polls closed this year, Republicans pulled the wraps off their next ugly surprise.
They don’t just hate public employees and public employee unions. Republicans hate all working-class people and private unions as well that still have some power to improve workers’ lives and help them feed their families.
For their next trick to be played on any workers who voted for them, Republicans want to turn Wisconsin into a union-hostile, right-to-work state, a sorry condition once limited to ignorant, low-wage Southern states where unions were too weak to have any say in wages, hours or working conditions.
Walker pretended throughout the election that he had no interest in devastating private-sector employee unions with right-to-work laws. Now Republican leaders say they’re absolutely compelled to do it and it has to happen quickly.
“We can’t tiptoe through this session without addressing this,” said Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald. “We’re not tackling this six months from now. We’re not tackling this a year from now. ... There’s no way we avoid this issue. We have to deal with this issue right now.”
Golly, I wonder who could be forcing Republicans to try to destroy all the unions in the state. It’s certainly not the voters who kept getting all those false assurances from Walker that it would never happen.
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Right-to-Work Lowers All Wages
Who’s really calling the shots became obvious when an organization called Wisconsin Right to Work formed immediately after the election.
The group is headed by a former operative of Americans for Prosperity, the front organization billionaires Charles and David Koch use to funnel millions in campaign contributions to Walker and other right-wing Republicans.
They are the wealthy donors who control Walker and make his phony pretense he’s reluctant to support right-to-work legislation totally absurd.
There are only two interpretations of Walker’s political career.
Either he’s a true believer, an absolute ideologue who really does believe in all the nutty, extreme, right-wing policies he embraces. Or he’s simply a corrupt opportunist serving as a tool for the nutty, extreme, right-wing billionaires who fund him.
Walker’s entire political future has been based on pleasing the Kochs and tea party extremists. And he’s publicly supported making Wisconsin a backward, right-to-work state since 1993.
The Republican cover story is that right-to-work gives workers more freedom. But the Republicans’ twisted idea of freedom is that even if workers are represented by a union, they shouldn’t be required to pay union dues.
So workers are free to be freeloaders. They receive the same wage increases and benefits negotiated by the union as everybody else, but they don’t pay their share of any of the union’s negotiating and legal expenses.
The real point of such laws is to weaken unions so workers will be paid less.
And the terrible news for Wisconsin is that you don’t have to work for a union company for your pay and benefits to be cut by right-to-work laws.
In fact, a study by the Economic Policy Institute shows states with right-to-work laws have wages and benefits that are 3% lower for union and non-union workers alike than states without such laws.
That’s the real reason why Republicans want to snuff the last breath of life out of unions at a time when they don’t really represent all that many people anyway. In 2013, only 8.2% of Wisconsin’s private workers were union members, compared with 19.8% 30 years ago.
A three-decade assault has dramatically weakened unions and kept middle-class wages virtually stagnant while the wealth of those at the top has multiplied many times over.
Under Republicans, powerful corporate bosses have now replaced those mythical union bosses who were gone long ago. The difference is wealthy corporate bosses really couldn’t care less about working people.
But there are still some unions in Wisconsin fighting hard for wage increases and protecting benefits for working people. As a result, even some non-union companies will have to pay decent wages to compete for workers.
Unless all unions are totally destroyed, private employers will never be able to pay Wisconsin workers as miserably as they would like.
That’s why the real bosses of Walker and his Republican serial killers put the hit out on all unions after the election. Stop them before they kill again.
