The Republican-dominated state Legislature is poised to overhaul the state’s civil service system, undoing a major progressive feat accomplished by then-Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette to ensure fairness in the workplace. When Gov. Scott Walker signs off on the bill, he’ll take the state back to the bad old days when those who are politically connected or corrupt could land and keep a state job. Those who are smart and talented but didn’t flatter the right person or have the good fortune of being born into an elite family will be at a disadvantage.
Republicans have used very thin reasons to change the current system. They want it to be more nimble, they say, and they also want to punish those who act unethically but are protected by the current work rules. They used the example of two state railroad commission employees having sex on the job to highlight how weak the system is. Walker said the workers couldn’t be fired. But he was wrong—the person in charge, Railroad Commissioner Jeff Plale, simply didn’t fire them and instead chose to reprimand them. Plale resigned earlier this month. But Walker’s lie lives on.
Now in an effort to try again to build opposition to Wisconsin’s civil service system, Walker has a new so-called scandal hitting the media. A supervisor at the Stanley Correctional Facility was reprimanded for getting into a car accident while drunk, possessing drugs and paraphernalia and refusing to tell investigators where he got the drugs. Under our current civil service system, that supervisor could have and should have been fired. The problem, of course, is that the supervisor got off lightly. He received a reprimand and kept his job. A regular citizen or regular prison worker would have likely been fired and possibly prosecuted for the same behavior. And, of course, this supervisor is working in a prison full of inmates who have been convicted of committing the same or similar offenses, yet he remains free and on the state’s payroll.
There’s no real standard or logic at work here, and the Republicans’ destruction of the state’s civil service system won’t create a fair playing field, either. That’s because the bill isn’t really intended to fix the system, just as Walker’s anti-worker agenda isn’t making the state’s economy thrive. After five years of Scott Walker as governor, we are still at the bottom of the pack when it comes to job creation among the upper Great Lakes states. Instead, as the New York Times’ contributor Dan Kaufman explained over the weekend, Walker’s overall aim is to destroy Wisconsin’s progressive tradition, undo Fighting Bob La Follette’s legacy and bring “Wisconsin closer to the achievement of a long-sought goal of the libertarian right: universal ‘at-will employment’” in which employees can be fired any time for any reason and a system of rewarding friends with good paying state jobs even if they are not be best candidate for the job. Once again, Walker is using Wisconsin’s workers to try to further his career as he did when he divided our state and attacked collective bargaining in hopes of using that ploy to get elected president. It seems the rest of the country could see through Scott Walker even before the first primary vote was cast. The state needs to look beyond Scott Walker and to take a long look at fairness in the employment and criminal justice sectors—but the Republicans’ civil service “fix” isn’t going to help anything but perhaps Walker’s new personal ambitions, whatever they may be.
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