Scott Walker earned praise from labor-policy experts for putting the issue of labor-policy reform front and center with a policy white paper and a speech in Las Vegas on Monday.
The Republican presidential hopeful proposed sweeping reforms of labor policy at a federal level, similar in scope to the overhaul he implemented in Wisconsin.
Walker sees tackling labor policy as an integral part of any economic policy plan, says a senior aide to the governor, something as essential for any candidate to put forward as, say, a tax plan. “This is a big area, and people who don’t touch this are going to be missing in action,” says the senior aide.
And labor-policy experts are pleased that he has put the issue in the spotlight.
“I think it’s been missing from any kind of serious conversation for far too long, and I’m just delighted that at least one of the presidential candidates has chosen to issue the statement on it,” John Raudabaugh, a former Republican appointee to the National Labor Relations Board who is now a professor of labor policy at Ave Maria School of Law, tells National Review.
The proposal, among other things, would eliminate the National Labor Relations Board, make right-to-work the national standard, and prevent unions from automatically deducting dues from members’ pay.
Walker presented the plan at a campaign event in Las Vegas, a city where unions play a powerful role in policy and politics. The senior aide says the choice of location was intentional, to demonstrate that he is not afraid to get up close and kick the hornets’ nest.
The proposal, among other things, would eliminate the National Labor Relations Board, make right-to-work the national standard, and prevent unions from automatically deducting dues from members’ pay. Walker describes the plan as an effort to “bring our federal labor laws into the 21st century,” and labor policy experts say that 80 years after the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1935, it is time to take a new look at what it did.
“We need to have Congress reexamine the fundamental principles of what labor law should be all about it,” says Raudabaugh. “I find it absolutely an abdication of their legislative responsibility to think that you can expect an independent agency or any agency to somehow interpret what Congress intended when Congress last spoke so long ago. It’s really up to Congress at this juncture to consider the nature of work and reexamine our whole labor-law structure. And that’s what the governor is suggesting.”
Walker’s proposal to eliminate the NLRB, an agency that many Republicans feel has become toxically partisan, was well received by some scholars.
“The National Labor Relations Board has become a highly partisan agency that does more harm than good. The board has outlived its usefulness and should be abolished. Government agencies shouldn’t operate to confer benefit to the narrow, private agendas of special-interest groups such as labor unions,” says Trey Kovacs of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Raudabaugh, who left the board in 1993, concurs, saying that over the past three administrations, “the politicization of the board has become beyond extreme.”
The implementation of such a plan, however, could present some serious hurdles.
“It’s a real, real, real hard lift to do at the federal level what Governor Walker did in Wisconsin,” says Michael Lotito, co-chairman of the conservative Workplace Policy Institute. Lotito praises Walker for “raising very legitimate issues that need very, very thoughtful responses,” but says Walker’s solution would be nearly impossible to implement “without some very fundamental changes in the political dynamics of this country.”
Walker, in his speech, proposed a combination of executive actions — things he proposed to do “on day one” of a Walker administration — and other changes that he would work to move through Congress.
“He’s a governor who’s used to doing both,” says the senior policy aide.
Still, notes Lotito, if Walker thought labor rose up against him in Wisconsin, it would only be worse at the federal level.
“This plan would be seen by organized labor as a threat to its existence, and they would put every single resource at their disposal, they would stop at nothing, they would access every single political contact that they had in order to make sure that none of it ever came to the light of day,” he says. And Walker would need to be sure he had enough votes in Congress to pass such legislation: On such a highly charged political issue, members could not be expected to vote along straight party lines.
The policy proposals of campaigns, of course, are often more aspirational than actual blueprints for governance. Still, Walker’s plan brings the issue of labor policy into the conversation about how to fix the economy, and it raises the question of what role such reform ought to play.
Even if his proposal never sees the light of day as actual policy, it is forcing policymakers to ask the right questions, says Raudabaugh, adding: “I just applaud the idea of saying, ‘Isn’t it time we look at this again?’”
And for Walker, spotlighting the issue could pay political dividends. As the Wisconsin governor struggles to emerge from a lackluster summer of campaigning, this plan marks a return to talking about the issues that set his star ablaze in the first place.
— Alexis Levinson is a senior political reporter for National Review.