By Kirsten Adshead | Wisconsin Reporter

MADISON — The looming threat of the year's first real winter storm couldn't intimidate Don Roberts.

Dressed for the weather in boots, jacket and no gloves, Roberts stood, for hours, on Jan. 11 near the entrance to the Hurley Inn.

“I was never involved in politics before this,” Roberts, a Wausau retiree and former union member, said outside the hearing on the Assembly's mining bill.

He held a “Recall Scott Walker” sign and a clipboard, seeking out a few more people willing to sign a recall petition to kick the governor out of office.

“I got three people that didn’t sign in the (first) 15, 20 minutes I was standing here,” said Roberts, who remained outside for the entire morning.

Ousting Walker, he said, is worth the effort.

On Tuesday, the liberal political action committee United Wisconsin said it submitted about 1.9 million petition signatures to recall Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and four GOP state senators — easily enough, if validated, to force all six elected officials into recall elections.

If that happens, these elections largely will be due to people like Roberts, current and former labor union members who arguably are the face of the opposition to Walker and the Republican-led Legislature in the wake of last year's passage of strict limitations on collective bargaining for most of the state's public union workers.

Defining labor

Officially, Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines labor union as “an organization of workers formed for the purpose of advancing its members' interests in respect to wages, benefits, and working conditions.”

The definition ignores, however, what labor unions have come to symbolize.
 
To supporters, unions are a bastion of democracy, fighting for the rights of poor- and middle-class workers in a world ruled by greedy corporate managers with little regard for their employees or the effect of the corporate policies on the rest of society.

To critics, unions are money- and power-hungry, offering job protection for lazy workers while discouraging non-union employment growth, constantly asking society for handouts and, particularly in the case of public unions, leeching off taxpayers.

• Unionized firms are less able to compete in the domestic or global marketplace.
• Unions can help raise productivity and reduce worker turnover, but at a steep cost to unionized employers.
• Unions extract higher above-market pay and benefits from employers, while more rigid union work rules reduce efficiency and blunt the ability of management to adapt to changing market conditions.

"There are plenty of others I'm sure that will gladly pay what (teachers) do (to pension and health care plans) and be happy to have a job," Marnee Larsen Wolfrath wrote on Wisconsin Reporter's Facebook wall. "Not to mention summers off and how many other weeks?"

Act 10 divide

Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, have succeeded in pushing through a conservative agenda since gaining legislative majorities nationwide in the 2010 elections.

New laws require Wisconsinites to present a state-issued photo ID card before voting, allow people to carry concealed weapons and provide legal protection for property owners who kill intruders.

But it was the passage of Act 10, the law curbing collective bargaining for most public employees, that brought tens of thousands of protesters to Madison, garnered ongoing national attention and debate, and put the state onto its current recall path.

“Had the budget repair bill not taken away collective bargaining rights for public employees, the protests would have been much smaller and recall elections would not be happening,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden wrote in an email to Wisconsin Reporter this week. “That initiative was what inflamed and in fact created many of Walker's opponents.

"The recall elections will be about more than that, including things like the state employment situation and legislation signed into law over the past year, but collective bargaining was the ignition for the larger fire.”

Whether union members turn out to vote may determine the success or failure of the recall efforts.

Strength in numbers?

In 2010, 355,000 Wisconsinites were union members, down from 400,000 the previous year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS.

If those households vote in high numbers, and if they can turn out sympathetic family and friends, those votes could quickly exceed the 1,128,159 ballots cast for Walker in November 2010, when he beat Democratic opponent and possible recall candidate Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.

Under Act 10, unions are banned from requiring union members to pay union dues, and the majority of a union’s membership must vote each year to re-certify the union.

Union members also are required to contribute more to their pension and health-care plans.

“Unions will be key to getting out the anti-Walker vote,” Burden wrote. “Their finances might be suffering from the restrictions on dues collections, but they continue to play an important role in mobilizing volunteers.”

Organized labor's membership ranks, nationwide and in the Badger State, continue to diminish, however.

In 2010, union members represented 11.9 percent of the U.S. total workforce, down from 12.3 percent a year earlier, according to the latest data from BLS. Union membership was north of 20 percent in 1983.

To be sure, not all union workers like Walker or love the union.

Mark Larson, who identifies himself as an Eau Claire school district employee, commented on Wisconsin Reporter's Facebook account that, under the collective bargaining changes, his salary wasn't cut and,  "I also feel better about … having my neighbors, who live on a fixed income, not get completely screwed by my union!"

Dissension, though, can come at a price.

After Kristi Lacroix, a teacher at Lakeview Technology Academy, a choice school in Kenosha, praised Walker in one of his campaign ads in December, Lacroix said she was harassed and threatened.

“Kind of hard to keep my head up with stuff like this. I have said for a couple of years that I really need to leave teaching …I think it is time for me to move on …” Lacroix wrote on conservative radio show host Vicki McKenna’s Facebook site.

Generally, though, union members tend to support the Democratic Party.

In the November 2010 election, for example, union households broke nearly 2:1 in favor of Democrat Tom Barrett over Walker, 63 percent to 37 percent, according to a CNN exit poll of 2,166 respondents.

Walker has taken criticism from non-union members as well. Chris Reeder, a member of the actors’ union, has led 267 consecutive Solidarity Singalongs, a protest-via-song that occurs every weekday noon hour in the Capitol Rotunda.

The singalong’s anthem, to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” features a chorus of “Solidarity forever … for the union makes us strong.”

“Certainly (at) the singalong, we have union members, we have non-union members, we have people (for whom) the union issue is their main issue, and we have a lot of people (for whom) it’s just one of the issues they’re concerned about,” Reeder said.

But data from last year’s recalls, in which two GOP senators lost their seats, indicate the strength and importance of union backing.

'Proving grounds'

Candidates, political campaigns and special-interest groups spent $44 million in the 2011 recall elections this summer involving six Republicans and three Democrats, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, or WDC, which tracks and analyzes campaign spending.

At $10.75 million, the biggest special-interest spender was We Are Wisconsin, funded by a coalition of unions mostly based in Washington, including the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union, according to the WDC.

Last spring, unions also organized busloads of their members to protest in Madison after the details of the budget repair bill were released, chanting “this is what democracy looks like” as they circled the Capitol.

“I’ve met hundreds and hundreds of protesters and recall supporters and workers,” said Reeder, the singalong leader. “I haven’t met anyone yet who’s been paid by a union or who is here because a union sent them.”

Walker has big-money backers of his own.

Wisconsin law exempts elected officials facing a recall effort from standard campaign-contribution limits until a recall election officially has been ordered.

Walker collected $5 million from July through Dec. 10 of last year and reportedly was at a fundraiser in New York when the recall petitions were submitted.

Andrew Kersten, chairman of democracy and justice studies at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, said all the outside interest in the Wisconsin recalls is to be expected.

“There’s nothing that we can talk about in this state that doesn’t have national implications,” said Kersten, author of the e-book, “The Battle for Wisconsin: Scott Walker and the Attack on the Progressive Tradition.”

Indiana lawmakers are preparing for a vote on whether to make union dues optional in organized workplaces.

"We have a new privileged class in America," Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who rescinded state workers' collective bargaining power on his first day in office in 2006, told news site Politico. "We used to think of government workers and underpaid public servants. Now they are better paid than the people who pay their salaries."

Ohioans in November rejected legislation curtailing public-union powers.

"I think the outcome is an absolute momentum-shifting victory for the labor movement," Harold Schaitberger, president of the union International Association of Firefighters, told CBS news after November's decisive ballot question.

Kersten said liberal and conservative special-interest groups look to middle-of-the-road states such as these to judge reaction to policy initiatives.

“These are proving grounds,” he said.