Scott Walker decisively defeated the Wisconsin public employees unions and their Democratic surrogates on June 5th. Late that night word reached the offices of the president's reelection committee. Someone managed to smuggle out video of what happened next:
Progressive MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, discussing the debacle with Nancy Pelosi, notes that the Democrats can't win without union support and that legislation like Wisconsin's will kill the unions. She's only partly right. Wisconsin's legislation affects only public employee unions and not even all of those (police and firefighters are exempt). Even so, if PEUs lose strength it'll certainly diminish the ability of the Democratic party to elect candidates to office.
It should be noted that the strength of union support depends on their ability to compel employees to join and pay dues. Until Walker's reforms, union membership was mandatory and union dues were automatically deducted by the state from the employee's paycheck. The employee had no say in the matter. The state then gave the dues to the union which returned much of the cash in the form of political contributions and other forms of support to Democrats.
It was a hypocritical scam perpetrated on the taxpayers. I say hypocritical because it was foisted on the taxpayers by the party that proudly calls itself "pro-choice." Apparently, they believe you should be able to choose whether you will kill your unborn child, but not whether you will belong to a union.
In any event, Act 10 has done away with that system and allows people to choose whether they wish to join the union or not. As a result thousands of people, to the dismay of Democrats, have voted with their feet. The Wisconsin chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, a labor organization representing 17,000 public-school teachers, has seen 6,000 members leave its ranks in the last year.
The state chapter of AFSCME, the union that represents state, county, and municipal workers, has suffered the loss of 30,000 members in the same span, although many of these losses were due to government layoffs. Even so, when Walker first proposed his fiscal reforms in early 2011, AFSCME’s Wisconsin membership stood at 62,818. By February 2012, membership had shrunk to 28,745.
Look for the trend to spread across the nation and for more video of enraged Democrat party officials to appear on You Tube.
