Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) legislation stripping public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights, and imposing new restrictions on their organization, is set to have its logical conclusion on Thursday — when the major state employee unions officially decline to seek recertification.
As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, today is the deadline for unions to file petitions seeking a recertification election, and to pay a fee to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. And that is a process upon which the larger unions are not embarking, with only a few locals thus far taking on the challenge. The unions can continue to exist, but will lose many important advantages of certification.
The paper reports: “The decertification won’t happen, however, until it’s requested by either the employer or a citizen, [Employment Relations Commission chairman James Scott] said. That’s in part because the agency doesn’t have a master list of all the public employee unions in the state, he said.”
The law requires that unions win new certification elections each year — with the added threshold for victory being 50%-plus-one of all affected workers, not just a majority of those who turn out to vote. As the Journal Sentinel and others have pointed out, this is itself a much higher bar than Walker and the Republican state legislators who passed the law must themselves meet in order to win their offices.
“We looked at the law and we find the law at best an exercise in wasted resources,” said Marty Beil, executive director of the 23,000-member Wisconsin State Employees Union. “We’ve chosen to use our resources to organize our members and advocate for our members.”
Without certification, government employers will not have to recognize the union or bargain with them over anything — but then again, there is not much left to bargain for, except for pay increases within a limited range.
Bryan Kennedy, president of the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin, declared: “You go through all that and all you get to do is bargain (for limited raises).”
