In tonight’s GOP presidential debate, Scott Walker should go big. Specifically, the governor of Wisconsin should distinguish himself from his 15 Republican rivals by highlighting Power to the People — Not the Union Bosses, his just-unveiled proposal for wholesale reform of America’s labor laws. This is an incredibly courageous, dramatic bid to drag Washington’s worksite policies into the 21st century.
“Unfortunately,” Walker writes in his capitalist manifesto, “many of the nation’s federal labor laws and regulations have stood as a roadblock to fairness and opportunity, and instead have created rigid, top-down workplaces that don’t really work for Americans.”
Governor Scott Walker (R., Wisc) unveiled his labor reforms Monday in Las Vegas.
Fundamentally, Walker would make America a right-to-work nation. Walker wants the federal government to assume, by default, that everyone has the right to choose whether or not to join a labor union. However, Walker respects the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. Thus, he preserves the power of any individual state to adopt forced-labor-membership rules. If, say, Vermont resists a federal right to work and restores compulsory union shops, Walker would let it so shackle itself.
Walker also would shutter all federal unions. No less than Franklin Delano Roosevelt opposed labor units for federal workers. “All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” FDR explained in 1937. “It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.”
There were no federal-employee unions until JFK permitted them via executive order in 1962. Congress did not fully authorize them until it passed, and President Jimmy Carter signed, the Federal Labor Relations Act of 1978.
Among various modernizations, Walker would:
‐Scrap the National Labor Relations Board. In place of the often pro-union agency, Walker writes, “I will transfer the NLRB’s quasi-judicial functions to the federal court system.” The National Mediation Board would assume supervision of union elections.
‐Dump “official time.” In a massive attack on taxpayers, labor activists inside federal agencies perform union duties — rather than public service — and taxpayers pay them for those misallocated work hours. Indeed, in 2012, taxpayers financed 3,395,187 hours of such fraudulently labeled “official time.”
As Walker puts it, “Consider the effect on the more than 600,000 veterans who faced delays for needed medical care at the Department of Veterans Affairs while more than 250 VA employees — including nurses, pharmacists, and rehabilitation experts — worked 100 percent official time for the big-government union bosses.”
‐End forced union dues. If people want to make such payments, let them. But, Walker writes, “Individuals should not have to pay union bosses for the right to earn a living.”
‐Defend workers’ right to cast secret ballots in union-certification elections and guarantee that they periodically can vote on staying unionized.
‐Ditch the Davis-Bacon Act’s requirement for union wages on federally funded construction projects. This alone could save taxpayers $13 billion over ten years, Walker estimates. Non-union workers tend to step lively. This could speed construction timetables.
“Walker proposes restoring the union transparency rules that Obama rescinded shortly after he took office,” Heritage Foundation labor economist James Sherk observes. “Union trust funds (e.g. strike funds or apprenticeship and training funds) would have to reveal their expenditures and receipts to their members, as would local chapters of government unions . . . This would open union books to sunlight and deter corruption.”
Sherk adds that Walker would create brand-new whistleblower protection for union officers who expose graft in labor organizations. No such federal shield exists. Sherk cites an International Union of Operating Engineers executive who got fired for reporting a colleague who allegedly embezzled $25,000 in union dues to buy breast implants for his mistress. Federal law currently allows that whistleblower’s dismissal.
“It ought to be illegal to fire a union officer for trying to do the right thing,” Sherk says. “Walker proposes to protect union officers who have the integrity to expose corruption. How that is ‘anti-worker’ is beyond me.”
Walker recently released a concrete plan to repeal-and-replace Obamacare. This week’s labor-reform proposal boldly goes where no candidate has gone before. Perhaps such valiant specificity will put some Teamster-strength muscle beneath Walker’s poll numbers and restore them to their previous commanding heights.