Over the past few weeks, we’ve learned that Wisconsin senate Democrats all agree that public-employee collective bargaining is a “right,” the only disagreement being whether this right is of the “human” or the “God-given” type.

Something else these senators have in common: They all deny these basic “rights” to their own staffers.

Senate staffers in Wisconsin are at-will employees; they can be hired or fired for any reason. (Certain senators are notorious for their high staff turnover rates.) Staffers are told by their senator how much they will make and what their benefits will be. If they don’t like the deal they get, they are welcome to go work in the private sector.

It’s not as if being a senate staffer is an easy job, either. Your entire mission is to make your boss look as good as possible, which can be a challenge on the occasions when he decides to flee the state to grind democracy to a halt. You are expected to go off payroll every two years to run campaigns. Often, your boss will call with an idea for a bill she thought of over breakfast, and your job is to have it in statutory language by lunch. You can spend your entire day taking phone calls from constituents who have a specious grasp on reality. (When I worked as a senate staffer, our office took a call from a woman who wanted the “Deer Crossing” sign near her house moved because too many deer were using the crossing. She actually thought the deer read the sign and decided it would be okay to cross there.)

As I recall, an effort was made a number of years ago to organize senate staff. Due to budget cuts, staffers were made to take unpaid furlough days, unilaterally imposed by the majority leader at the time. Staffers were powerless to resist the pay reduction — yet the effort to unionize went nowhere.

It will be interesting to see how senate Democrats’ staffers ask their bosses for a raise next year. “Uh, boss, remember that time you fled the state because you believed so strongly that hard-working state employees deserve better wages and that collective bargaining is a human right?”

Awkward.

— Christian Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.