Christian Schneider

Author, Columnist

Month: October 2010

Why a Lame Duck Session Could be Good For Unions, but Bad for Taxpayers

duckFor the first time in ages, Wisconsin is going to have a new governor that did not rise to the state’s top job from the ranks of state government. Yet the specter of one of the current candidates is already affecting how the current state government does business.

The polls may be close, but Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker has held a consistent lead in the gubernatorial race against Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. This fact is not lost on the elected officials and bureaucrats in Madison, who have been bracing state government for a win by the conservative Walker.

For instance, Walker has said that if elected, he would make it his mission to stop construction of a federally-funded $810 million rail line between Madison and Milwaukee. As a response, the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (DOT) reacted by shoveling as much money out the door as possible, to make it more difficult for a potential Governor Walker to stop its construction. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, $300 million will be committed to the project by the end of 2010, up from the $50 million previously estimated.

Other legislative actions attempted to buttress state government against Walker’s potential victory. In its waning session days, the Wisconsin Legislature entertained proposals to extend the tenure of existing cabinet secretaries (making sure they stay in office well into Walker’s first term), and further restricting the Wisconsin governor’s veto authority – a move Democrats resisted during Jim Doyle’s tenure.

And while the session has ended and legislators are strewn throughout the state trying to get themselves re-elected, legislative Democrats still have one large pre-emptive chip to play: state employee union contracts.

Every two years, the Legislature sets aside funds to pay for unionized state employee raises. For the 2010-11 fiscal years, $351 million was budgeted for this compensation reserve fund.

Once the money is set aside, the state Department of Employment Relations (DER) is charged with negotiating contracts with the state’s 19 professional unions. Currently, all 19 units are actively negotiating with the state. Once agreement is reached with the state, each bargaining unit must go back to their members and ratify the contracts before they are voted on by the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Employee Relations.

Normally, this is a fairly lengthy process. But with a new governor entering office in three months, this isn’t a normal year.

Consider the fact that union-friendly Democrats hold control of the State Legislature all the way up until the new session begins on January 3rd of 2011 (the heads of both legislative houses are former labor leaders). Also, consider that former state senator and Democratic Party of Wisconsin chair Joe Wineke is the DER representative negotiating on the state’s behalf. Wineke, currently the Administrator of the DER’s Division of Compensation and Labor Relations, has a long history of supporting union-friendly legislation, including “card check” proposals that would allow greater intimidation of workers hesitant to unionize.

The calculus isn’t difficult. There’s a large pot of money waiting to be handed out to unionized state employees, and the process is controlled by the legislators most likely to reward those employees with pay raises. And with a fiscal conservative like Scott Walker poised to take control of the governorship, this might be their last chance to reap the largesse of the state’s compensation fund.

If settlements are reached with the unions soon, it could only be a matter of weeks before the contracts are ratified and sent to the Legislature for approval. Democrats would have to bless the contracts during their lame duck session, which to this point would be unprecedented. But they’re two years away from another election, and many of them will be leaving the chambers for good when the new session begins.

The unions themselves have noticed. On their website, the Wisconsin State Employees Union has specifically called for a legislative special session in November or December, so they can get Governor Doyle’s signature on their contracts by January 1st:

“Our window of opportunity gets narrower if we decide to settle, we would want to gain legislative approval and the governor’s signature before January 1, meaning we only have November and part of December to have a special session called for ratification.”

What’s stopping them?

-October 20, 2010

H.L. Mencken on the Recession

Okay, he was talking about the depression, but it still holds beautifully:

It is only the story of those Americans who yielded irrationally to professional seers and visionaries, as yokels yield to travelling [sic] corn-doctors and evangelists… Are the rest of us in the same boat? I doubt it.  The boat we are in is getting some unpleasant rocking from the foundering of the other, but it is tighter of seam and will survive.  We have all lost something, but not many have really lost everything.  In actual values, the country is still rich, and any man who owns any honest part of it still has that part, and will see it making money for him when the clouds roll by… It seems to me that the depression will be well worth its cost if it brings Americans back to their senses.  Once they rediscover the massive fact that hard thrift and not gambler’s luck is the only true basis of national wealth, they will discover simultaneously that a perfectly civilized and contented life is possible without the old fuss and display.

Fact Check: Scott Walker on Mammograms

While there are a few websites out there dedicated to fact-checking Wisconsin political ads (including Charlie Sykes’ “Politicrap,” to which I have contributed), it’s hard to catch all the ads that are circling the airwaves.  In fact, a good campaign will keep the accusations flying, so that by the time someone can actually test their veracity, it seems like old news.

But there’s one accusation that caught my eye in the past few days that needs some attention.  An ad run by the Greater Wisconsin Committee (funded with $1 million of Governor Jim Doyle’s campaign money) claims that Scott Walker once voted to “deny women mammograms,” and to “cancel” their policies.

Well.

The source cited by the ad is Assembly Amendment 15 to Assembly Amendment 2 to Assembly Substitute Amendment 1 to Assembly Bill 133, which is the state budget bill from 1999.  (Technically, Walker voted to “table,” the Amendment, not against it – but that’s neither here nor there.)

This vote was part of the kabuki dance that goes on with every state budget.  A caucus (in this case, Assembly Republicans) gets together and agrees to their version of the budget.  When their negotiated agreement comes to the floor, the minority party (in this case, Assembly Democrats) offers dozens, if not hundreds, of amendments to the budget package – knowing full well that none of them will pass.  The purpose of offering them is solely for campaign season, so they can use them against members of the majority party.  (Who knew they’d keep this one in their back pocket for 11 years to use against Walker?)  Oddly, nobody in the state media considers the hours they spend taking these votes to be “campaign activity,” when, in fact, these votes exist only to hammer lawmakers in political ads.

To show this is a bipartisan phenomenon, take the 2009-11 budget bill deliberations.  When 2009 AB 75 (the budget bill) came to the floor, Republicans offered over 120 amendments.  One by one, the Democratic majority tabled them.  So each Democrat voted “against” those amendments in the same way Scott Walker voted “against” mammograms.

As someone who’s run campaigns in the past, I know there’s a hierarchy of attacks you can make against an opponent – if you have something really good, you use it the best way you can.  If you have something that’s semi-good, you twist it to make it as good as you can.  And if you have nothing on your opponent, you use one of these obscure, castoff budget votes.

But let’s look at what Scott Walker voted “against.”

In the 1999 budget, Assembly Republicans sought to include a provision that would have helped small businesses purchase affordable health care for their employees (see page 128 of the amendment here.)  The “Private Employer Health Care Purchasing Alliance,” as it was called, would have had the Wisconsin Insurance Commissioner solicit bids from plans that wanted to take part in the program.  If an employer took part in the program, the employer was required to offer health insurance to any employee that worked more than 30 hours per week – and pay for between 50% to 100% of those employees’ health care premiums.

However, in order to provide more flexible plans to keep costs down, some of the plans were allowed exemptions from state-imposed mandates.  For instance, every health plan in Wisconsin must carry coverage for chiropractic service – which adds cost to health plans.  Mammograms are another state mandate, and health plans were allowed to take part that did not cover them.

However – and this is important – plans offered by employers had to include at least one plan with the full complement of state mandates.  From page 132 of the bill, line 22:

The department shall ensure that at least one health care coverage plan includes all of the coverages specified in subd. 2. (the list of mandates.)

What the bill attempted to do was to keep costs down by offering flexibility within plans.  If you are a young, healthy, male, you wouldn’t be forced to buy a plan that makes you pay for mammograms.  If you’re a female who’s never taken a drink of alcohol, you wouldn’t be forced to pay extra for a plan that covers services for alcoholism.  And if you didn’t want to pay for a chiropractor, you wouldn’t have to.  Although legislative Democrats purport to want to keep health costs down, every mandate they add raises the cost of health insurance.

However, the bill ensured that if you did want coverage for all these things, there would be a plan available to you through your employer.  (If your employer didn’t take part in the program, you’d have to purchase health care just like you do now – but with the full complement of expensive mandates.)  The amendment Walker voted to table would have moved many of these procedures back into the “mandated” category – but his vote didn’t deny mammogram coverage to a single woman in Wisconsin.  In fact, if the program were to be administered correctly, it would ensure that many more women received better health care through their employer for a lower price.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the final budget that year was such a horrifying document, it passed by an overwhelmingly bipartisan margin – 82 to 17 in the Assembly.  And it did include a version of the Private Employer Health Care Coverage Plan.