Politicians Try to Union-Bust Their Way to the White House
Fiery labor icon Mother Jones cannot be resting peacefully beneath the crabgrass in the Union Miners’ Cemetery, not far from Springfield, Illinois, where Bruce Rauner, the recently elected Republican governor, has launched an unprecedented attack on organized labor. Rauner, a former private equity fund chairman, made a reported $62 million in 2013, the year before he was elected. Now the Harvard MBA is challenging public and private unions on several fronts—even pushing the state’s municipalities to create “right-to-work zones,” where workers in unionized jobs could opt out of paying union dues. This town-by-town approach is a relatively new idea and may be of dubious legality, but it’s already caused Cook County, where Chicago is situated, to preemptively declare that it won’t go along.
Rauner is part of a clique of Midwestern Republican governors challenging unions in a region where behemoths like the United Auto Workers and massive public employee unions covering teachers and other state employees have long dominated. In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker diminished the power of the state’s public employee unions in 2011 by pushing through a law that cut their benefits and limited their collective bargaining power.
That move, and his survival of a union-led recall effort in 2011, not only propelled Walker into the first tier of Republican presidential candidates; it also emboldened conservative governors and legislators around the Great Lakes. Governor Rick Snyder made Michigan a right-to-work state in 2012, and Indiana’s governor at the time, Mitch Daniels, followed suit, creating a bloc of anti-union states in what was once a labor stronghold. Their latest victory: Last month, Walker signed a law making Wisconsin the nation’s 25th right-to-work state.
Rauner’s efforts in Illinois are getting the closest scrutiny. That state is an unlikely launch pad for a crusade against union power. It has been a solidly blue state in presidential elections since 1992 and had not elected a Republican governor since 1998 until Rauner, a longtime friend of Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayor who had also worked in private equity, won office last year. Conservative journalist Stephen Moore called the political newcomer’s campaign “the biggest election of 2014.“ Illinois, he wrote in National Review, “could become a laboratory experiment about whether conservative ideas can work in a state that has been ruled by...unions and a self-serving political machine in Springfield and Chicago.”
Once in office, Rauner issued a “Turnaround Agenda” that begins with this premise: “Government union leaders are funding politicians who negotiate their pay and benefits.” To put an end to that, Rauner issued an executive order challenging collective bargaining agreements with state employees and urged municipalities and counties to create their right-to-work zones.
Rauner frames the issue as one of freedom and local control. The governor says he wants Illinois communities to decide whether “their businesses should be subject to forced unionism or employee choice.” Forced unionism is a familiar phrase among opponents of collective bargaining, but it’s also a misleading one. If a majority of workers vote to form a union, then it’s customary for workers to be compelled to pay dues as a price for being in a union. Those who don’t want to join the union are required to pay something so they aren’t getting a free ride. By giving workers the prerogative not to pay union dues, right-to-work laws undercut the power of unions.
Hoping to spur municipalities to take on public-employee unions, Rauner sent right-to-work resolutions to all of Illinois’s cities and villages. A municipality can just insert its name and vote on it. It’s a smart strategy since the Illinois statehouse is solidly Democratic and won’t pass a right-to-work law. Setting fires in small towns might arouse anti-union sentiment, and it will surely inflame the unions. Last week, unions packed a meeting of the Oswego County board in northern Illinois, where the nonbinding resolution was up for discussion. Scott Roscoe, president of the Fox Valley Building Trades Council in Aurora, told a local journalist, “If we don't stop anti-worker schemes like right-to-work, more families will fall behind.”
Anti right-to-work protester Susan Laurin (C) of Michigan State Employees Union Local 6000 yells with fellow protesters outside of Michigan's state capitol building in Lansing, December 11, 2012. REBECCA COOK/REUTERS
So far, no Illinois communities have voted to become right-to-work zones. Three local legislative bodies have decided not to approve the resolutions, one without even holding a hearing. And there’s some question as to whether the adoptions of such zones is legal. (The National Labor Relations Act seems to give this kind of authority to states and territories, but not towns.)Politicians Try to Union-Bust Their Way to the White House: