Scott Walker will roll out a plan to limit the power of labor unions in a speech Monday, in a return to his bread-and-butter issues as he seeks to get his campaign back on track.
Walker put himself on the map as a serious conservative reformer when he took on Wisconsin’s labor unions in 2011 and successfully pushed through a law limiting collective bargaining. It is a major rationale for his presidential candidacy: that he not only proposed conservative policy reforms, but successfully enacted them and withstood the political backlash they sparked, winning a recall election and, then, re-election. Recent weeks have seen Walker plummet in the polls nationally and in Iowa, where his campaign set particularly high expectations, amid a series of fumbles on policy issues and continued struggles to express a clear message. Now, Walker is returning to the Wisconsin record that launched him onto the national radar. In his speech Monday afternoon, he will lay out a vision for applying the blueprint of his Wisconsin reforms on a federal level.
In the speech, according to excerpts and a white paper released by the campaign, Walker will propose eliminating the National Labor Relations Board, which he will say has “become a one-sided proxy for the big union bosses — often at the expense of taxpayers and workers.” He will also propose eliminating “big-government federal unions,” saying the time members of those unions spend on union efforts takes away from the time they spend doing their jobs serving the American people.
Walker’s plan would also make Right to Work nationwide, giving employees in both the public and private sector the choice of whether or not to join a union. Federal unions would be required to disclose the amount of money devoted to political activity, and unions would be prohibited from withholding those funds from members’ salaries. Walker would also force unions to disclose compensation paid to union officials, among other expenditures.
#share#The plan would allow bonuses for employees who perform well, which current law prohibits. It would roll back current administration policies on paid sick leave and overtime, a move that Walker will say provides workers with more flexibility. He would “provide employees with the option of using overtime for time off from work.”
“For many parents,” he will say, “more time with family is more valuable than a monetary payment. That’s pro-family.”
#related#Walker will also propose that the government be able to contract non-union labor for federal construction projects, and eliminate the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires certain wages be paid to employees working on federal contracts.
The setting of the speech, Las Vegas, is significant: It is a city with powerful labor unions.
Walker will discuss the effort as an extension of Ronald Reagan’s legacy of trying to “drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.” The Wisconsin governor has been perhaps the most blatant of all the GOP presidential contenders in seeking to paint himself as Reagan’s heir. Last week, he delivered a speech at Reagan’s alma mater, Eureka College, in Illinois. On Wednesday, he, along with his rivals for the Republican nomination, will appear at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley for the second GOP primary debate.
— Alexis Levinson is the senior political reporter for National Review.