Act 10 has worked, but public-sector unions want their power back.
Act 10 has worked, but public-sector unions want their power back.
I n 2011, Wisconsin Republicans successfully reformed collective bargaining for public employees. The reforms were controversial at the time, with left-wing protesters occupying the state capitol, Democrats in the senate fleeing the state, and Governor Scott Walker facing a recall election. In 2012, Walker won the recall election by a larger margin than he won his first term in 2010, and the reforms have stayed in place.
After the unions’ doomsday predictions failed to come true, voters rewarded Walker with a full second term in 2014. Today, the state budget is in a much better place than it was pre-2011, Wisconsin has one of the only fully funded pension systems in the country, and just about everybody has moved on.
Just about everybody, that is, except the unions.
They want their power back, and what they couldn’t get through the legislature or recall elections they now want to get through the courts. They’ve filed a lawsuit alleging the 2011 law, known as Act 10, is unconstitutional. They argue it violates equal protection because it exempts public-safety unions from its provisions.
The reason Walker gave at the time for exempting public-safety unions is that since teachers and other government employees walked off the job to protest the legislation, he didn’t want prison guards or police officers to join them in not performing their duties. There’s some sense to that, but it’s also true that public-safety unions are usually the only government unions that endorse Republicans. In principle, public-safety unions should not be exempt from collective-bargaining reforms, and the same problems that result in unaccountable teachers and bureaucrats can also result in unaccountable prison guards and police officers.
Policy aside, unions have tried this argument in court before, and it didn’t fly. In 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld Act 10 in full. In that ruling, the court said, “Distinguishing between public safety unions and general employee unions may have been a poor choice, but it is not unconstitutional.”
At this point, the court system should put up a sign that says, “Act 10 Is Still Constitutional,” and point to it whenever unions bring another lawsuit. The law has already been extensively litigated in both state and federal courts, and rulings against the law from progressive activist judges have not held up when appealed to higher courts.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court also upheld the law in 2014. But earlier this year, Janet Protasiewicz was elected to the supreme court. A progressive, she said she believes Act 10 is unconstitutional. She participated in protests against Act 10 in 2011 and signed the petition to recall Walker. She would make the fourth vote on the seven-member court against Act 10, tipping the balance toward the pro-union side.
The fundamental issue is that the government is allowed to prescribe by law the ways in which it chooses to employ people. You can check the Constitution: There is no right for public employees to be able to collectively bargain on whatever they want.
Act 10 should be a model for any state that believes, as the Constitution actually says, that states are guaranteed a republican form of government. That means a government accountable to the people through their elected representatives, not to the unions through their collective-bargaining agreements. If a union can bargain on every aspect of public employment, as they basically could in Wisconsin before Act 10, then elected leaders are severely limited in their ability to decide how the government is run.
Act 10 said government unions can bargain on wages and nothing else. Before Act 10, the teachers’ unions created their own insurance company, WEA Trust. When they could bargain on health benefits, they forced school districts to buy WEA Trust’s insurance, which was exorbitantly expensive. Freed from the monopoly, school districts have saved taxpayers in their jurisdictions millions of dollars by shopping around for health plans, and WEA Trust went out of business in 2022.
Act 10 said that joining a government union must be voluntary. That provision is now mostly superfluous since the Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME in 2017 that no public employees nationwide can be forced to financially support a union. Act 10 anticipated that decision by also prohibiting the automatic deduction of union dues for public employees, a reform that Florida made only this year, and several other states have yet to make.
Act 10 said that government unions are subject to recertification votes every year. They must win 51 percent of the eligible workers in a bargaining unit to remain the bargaining agent for those workers. If a union is doing a good job representing its workers, it should have no problem winning a majority vote once a year. Yet, in the eight years after Act 10 was passed, the number of unions holding recertification elections declined by 32 percent, and only 15 percent of unions that were decertified came back in subsequent years.
State government in Wisconsin is now more responsible with taxpayer money than it was before Act 10. Wisconsin’s pension system was 99.6 percent fully funded in 2022, and Act 10 has saved Wisconsin taxpayers over $15 billion by requiring government employees to contribute to their own health and retirement benefits. Before Act 10, most of them contributed nothing. Now most pay half of their retirement benefits and 12.6 percent of their health benefits — a benefits package still far more generous than what most workers receive.
Despite over a decade of success under Act 10, no victories in politics are permanent, and public-sector unions have especially long memories. If the new progressive majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court uses this lawsuit to invent a right for government employees to collectively bargain, it would be a disaster for Wisconsin’s taxpayers.