By Cliff Montgomery – Mar. 10th, 2011
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his Republican accomplices in the state Senate have proven themselves more clever than smart, after quickly ramming through stripped-down legislation meant to deny public employees their collective bargaining rights.
The state Senate requires that three-fifths of its members be present to vote on financial matters. The issue of collective bargaining rights for public employees is part of the Republican governor’s so-called ‘budget plan’.
For about three weeks, Wisconsin Senate Democrats have been out of state for the purpose of blocking the union-busting bill.
But overnight, Republicans quickly and quietly split Walker’s budget legislation into two. They placed the most questionable proposals–like the thorny issue of collective bargaining rights–into a separate bill that, they claimed, only needed a simple Senate majority for passage.
The action presumably met the approval of the billionaire Koch Brothers, who have backed Walker’s union- breaking bill since Day One.
But there are problems…
If indeed the legislation still constitutes a part of Gov. Walker’s budget plan, then it deals with financial issues. Thus a 3/5 majority is needed for legal passage, period.
Nor does it work for state GOP lawmakers to suddenly insist the union-breaking bill has nothing to do with the budget. That story only proves that Gov. Walker and other Republican lawmakers are a pack of liars, say labor representatives.
“Tonight, Scott Walker made it crystal clear to the people of Wisconsin–and the entire nation–the extent he will go to in order to pay back billionaires such as the Koch Brothers and bad actor corporations that want to destroy the middle class,” declared Mary Kay Henry, president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
“This legislative gimmick proves Walker’s attack on the middle class was never about balancing the budget – it was always about stripping workers of a voice and rewarding the cronies who helped finance his campaign.”
Representatives from Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI)–a union composed of public school teachers working in Madison, Wisconsin–already have said the bill “will be challenged in court.”
Thus in time, this “gimmick” could become a federal matter. And that may spell doom for the union-busting plans of Republican lawmakers in any state.
Why? Because the essential notion behind the collective bargaining rights of union members is founded on two Natural Rights: freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
These liberties are not bestowed by any government, but are innate human rights. That’s why the Founding Fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, [and] that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The U.S. Constitution thus doesn’t create liberties, but simply recognizes our most essential Natural Rights, which clearly include the freedoms of speech and assembly.
What governments have no power to grant, they have no power to take away.
And at first glance, it would appear that federal law agrees with this analysis.
In 1935, The Wagner Act–perhaps better known as the National Labor Relations Act–created a U.S. labor policy which recognized the rights of private-sector workers to organize and to engage in collective bargaining.
Some of the Wagner Act’s stated reasons for the law are telling:
“The inequality of bargaining power [for] employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract…substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and between industries [emphasis added].”
Over time, these rights were no longer seen as only pertaining to private-sector workers. In 1962, an executive order signed by President Kennedy recognized the right of public-employee unions to collectively bargain with federal agencies for better wages, benefits and working conditions.
We don’t claim to be legal experts here at The American Spark. But at first glance, it appears that Wisconsin Republican lawmakers have simply made a big mess much bigger.
