Scott Walker: Saint or Satan?

This week, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker became the first governor in U.S. history to survive a recall attempt. He won with a wider margin than the victory that put him in office in 2010, and against the same opponent. The professional pundits will be dissecting this election for weeks, even months, offering explanations about how and why it happened, and trying to read the tea leaves for what Walker’s victory portends for November’s election.

Depending on who you talk to, Walker is either a living saint or a demon in human flesh. Some portray him as a crusader bravely waging the most important fight of our era against labor corruption and big government, while others insist he is a slimy pawn of corporate interests bent on destroying the remnants of the middle class. The truth, of course, is neither of these.

American political discourse is not an inspiring thing. So often it is little more than an endless onslaught of tribalism and us-against-them rhetoric distilled down to bite-sized talking points for the lowest common denominator. It should come as no surprise that one analysis of the Congressional Record found members of Congress giving speeches at a 10th-grade level, which still puts their speech above the heads of most Americans, who read somewhere between an 8th and 9th grade level. Orwell wrote of a government that intentionally shrank the lexicon for the purpose of controlling the population, but here and now we need no government to destroy our language — we’re doing it to ourselves.

Our discourse has also become dangerously short-sighted. For all our talk about “a better tomorrow,” “fighting for the future,” and what not, we seldom look down the road to see how this or that policy impacts the future, and we often neglect to consider unintended consequences. That’s one reason why our government has a $15 trillion national debt and $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Our only real interest in the future, it seems, is how we can plunder it to fund today’s political promises.

Starting last year, Walker’s recall election and his controversial labor reform legislation that spawned it became the locus of an already polarized but scattered debate about the role of the public and private sectors in American life. This debate is nothing new, but it has taken a particular prominence in the civic discourse of late.

Long before I began writing on this site, writers here had lengthy discussions on Catholic social teaching and labor issues. Josh Mercer weighed in, as did Mark Stricherz (here, here, and here). I’m sure others wrote as well, and I apologize if I neglected mentioning or linking to other noteworthy articles. I’m glad this conversation took place, even if I didn’t follow it at the time. I suppose it’s difficult to avoid re-plowing broken soil, but I do think it’s important to first take a clear look at the major provisions of Walker’s legislation (Act 10, also known as the Budget Repair Bill). Act 10:

• Limits collective bargaining for public employees to wages only. Unions cannot bargain for wages beyond the Consumer Price Index. In order for public employees to obtain wage increases beyond the CPI, voters must approve a referendum.
• Ends the practice of the state and local governments deducting union dues from employee paychecks. The unions must obtain these dues directly from members now.
• Requires public employee unions to hold certification votes more frequently. Collective bargaining units must hold certification votes annually.
• Requires state employees to pay more for their health care benefits. Prior to Walker’s reforms, state employees paid, on average, 6% of their total health insurance premium cost (compared to an average of 15% for other government employees and a 20-26% average for private-sector employees). The legislation requires state employees to pay 12.6% of their health insurance premium.
• Requires public employees to pay more for their pension benefits. Previously, members of the Wisconsin Retirement System contributed little or nothing from their paychecks to their pension plan. Walker’s reform requires employees to pay 50% of the total contribution, which comes out to around 5.8% of an employee’s salary in 2011.
• Ends collective bargaining for certain categories of state employees. The legislation ends collective bargaining for faculty and academic staff at the University of Wisconsin (they had acquired this in 2009, though employees at only two campuses had unionized), home health care workers under the Medicaid program, family child care workers, and employees of the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics Board and Authority (the bill also eliminates state positions in the UWHC Board).
• Commissions state agencies to explore possible reforms to the pension system. These reforms might include changing from a define-benefit pension plan to a defined-contribution or 401(k)-style plan (a shift the private sector began making long ago), and lengthening the vesting period.

Walker’s reforms also tackled sundry smaller issues, such as preventing state employees from taking a sick day and then working another shift to still qualify for overtime.

Walker’s ultimate aim was to begin addressing one of the primary budget drivers facing state and local governments around the country: Personnel costs. One estimate pegs unfunded liabilities for state and local public-sector pensions at $4.4 trillion, or roughly 30% of total GDP. The generous health care plans that many public-sector employees enjoy come with a high and growing cost, too.

By and large, public-sector unions have done well for their members. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. As the saying goes, don’t be surprised when a dog barks — it’s his nature. It’s the union’s job to secure as good a deal as possible for its members. But it’s the job of lawmakers to look after the interests of the taxpayers, and indeed to promote the common good of all. But what happens to that dynamic when unions can bankroll the political campaigns of the very people with whom they negotiate labor contracts?

In the eyes of some, Walker’s most sweeping move was limiting collective bargaining to just wages. But I suspect two others have had and will continue to have more impact. By requiring the unions to collect membership dues rather than the state and local governments automatically deducting them from employee paychecks, and by requiring the unions to hold annual recertification votes, Walker actually made the unions more accountable to their members. That public-sector membership has declined sharply since Walker’s reforms took effect says something about member satisfaction.

Requiring unions to collect their members’ dues will have a big impact on their ability to finance political campaigns, which will impact Wisconsin’s political landscape over time. This move was one of Walker’s attempts at dealing with the structural cause of a problem rather than just dealing with its symptoms.

The Wisconsin Catholic Conference, recognizing the complexity of the situation and the reality that there’s no easy answer to the fiscal mess we’re in, remained neutral throughout the spat. This is not to say that Walker’s reforms fit squarely with Catholic social teaching. The Church affirms a worker’s right to join a union and bargain collectively, and Walker ended collective bargaining for select groups of state employees. Writers here and elsewhere have exchanged thoughts on whether or not the right to bargain collectively should include every imaginable condition of employment or type of compensation (working conditions, benefits, etc). The Church’s social teaching is crystal clear on some matters, and more ambiguous on others pertaining to labor issues. Her teaching rarely delves into the minutia of public policy, instead speaking of general principles that ought to guide decisions and form outcomes. Much is left to our prudential judgment, and at the end of the day, a lot of folks need to remember that sometimes there’s more than one legitimate way to tackle a problem.

Still, theologians ought to invest more time exploring the issue of public-sector collective bargaining, because it creates unique challenges and conditions that various Church leaders have discussed over the years. For example, in Laborem Exercens (#20), John Paul II said that

“[U]nion activity undoubtedly enters the field of politics, understood as prudent concern for the common good. However, the role of unions is not to ‘play politics’ in the sense that the expression is commonly understood today. Unions do not have the character of political parties struggling for power; they should not be subjected to the decision of political parties or have too close links with them. In fact, in such a situation they easily lose contact with their specific role, which is to secure the just rights of workers within the framework of the common good of the whole of society; instead they become an instrument used for other purposes.”

As I mentioned previously, public-sector unions fund the campaigns of the very officials with whom they negotiate labor contracts. That can pose a real threat to the common good, because often times lawmakers then choose not to weigh employee compensation among other funding priorities with which they grapple when building a budget. Compensation becomes sacrosanct and “off limits” when revenue is not sufficient to fund existing priorities.

Another issue that arises is the “closed shop,” which is really nothing other than compulsory unionization. Ought a person be forced to join or pay fees to a private association as a condition of employment? The Church affirms a worker’s right to join a union, but that has a flip side — a worker is also free to not join a union. As the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (#306) puts it, unions “must overcome the temptation of believing that all workers should be union-members.” But in many instances, changing this requirement doesn’t require changing the law because closed-shop provisions are negotiated into the labor contracts. All an executive or legislative body need to is refuse to allow closed-shop provisions in any contracts.

Some might insist that public-sector collective bargaining is really no different than in the private sector, that it doesn’t merit particular scrutiny. Yet even President Franklin Roosevelt, hardly a champion of unbridled capitalism, believed that collective bargaining could not be transplanted into the public sector. That someone of his stature worldview raised substantive objections suggests the issue bears more consideration.

Finally, we must keep in mind that, from the standpoint of Catholic social teaching, not all rights are absolute. The Church affirms, for example, the right to private property and the right of people to migrate. Yet there are limits. The same is true for collective bargaining, and I believe particularly in the public sector, when it poses a threat to the common good. As John Paul II said in Laborem Exercens (#20):

“Just efforts to secure the rights of workers who are united by the same profession should always take into account the limitations imposed by the general economic situation of the country. Union demands cannot be turned into a kind of group or class ‘egoism’.”

But my point here is not so much to measure Walker’s reforms against Catholic teaching as it is to challenge both the lionization and demonization of an elected official who, like most of us, doesn’t fit neatly into the categories that dominate our increasingly polarized political discourse. Scott Walker isn’t a theologian or even a Catholic, but he is a duly elected civil official on the working end of public policy, and as such he’s grappling with issues that, for many, are merely academic. He may not be getting everything right — and from the standpoint of Catholic social teaching, there’s a case to be made that he’s not — but he recognizes the alarming fiscal challenges facing state and local governments, and he has the political courage to advance unpopular, though arguably necessary, reforms. That’s more than can be said for a lot of public officials nowadays.

Is Walker a saint or satan? Neither, in spite of anyone’s attempts to canonize their own ideology into moral imperative. We would do well to keep Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s words in mind.

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.”

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