When Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball needed a guest early this year to express progressive outrage at the treatment of Wisconsin’s public-sector union workers, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn was a natural choice.
Quinn’s Democratic administration had openly offered Illinois as a sort of Midwestern Switzerland to Wisconsin legislators who fled their state, hoping to stop Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt at what critics said was classic union-busting directed at state workers there. Quinn himself was a lifelong progressive known for praising labor in terms effusive enough to make a union steward blush.
“It’s a war on workers, the people who teach our kids, who plow the snow off our interstates. Those are working men and women, and they deserve a decent pay and decent retirement,” Quinn said in that February 28 airing of Hardball, delivering flawlessly in his role as outraged pro-union governor. He called unions “the heart and soul of Illinois, the heart and soul of Wisconsin, the heart and soul of our country,” and lauded union workers as soldiers on “the front lines of democracy.”
“The right to have a union and to collectively bargain ... that’s a fundamental American right,” Quinn said. “What Gov. Scott Walker’s doing in Wisconsin is just plain wrong.”
By August, though, the script had changed. Illinois’ protracted fiscal crisis — which had already prompted a major income tax hike, teacher layoffs and billions of dollars in unpaid bills — now hit those working men and women. Quinn announced in July he wouldn’t honor a 2 percent scheduled pay increase for 30,000 workers throughout state government, despite the fact that it was written into their union contracts, because the legislature hadn’t appropriated the money.
“You can’t give money that isn’t there,” Quinn told reporters during State Fair week in mid-August, as he was confronted with the embarrassment of his one-time supporters in labor picketing in anger at him outside each of the fairground gates.
One of them, Philip Mark, a Chicago-based state Department of Human Services employee, had some choice words that day for the man who had touted labor’s virtues to a national audience just a few months earlier.
“It’s about killing the union. The bastard,” Mark told a reporter, when asked about Quinn.
“Don’t use that,” Mark quickly added. Then he pondered a moment longer and said: “No. Go ahead and use it.”
And in September, Quinn said he would have to close seven facilities and lay off more than 1,900 state employees, despite a promise he had made to AFSCME workers before last year’s election that their jobs were safe.
It’s perhaps understandable if Illinois state employees aren’t sure where the line is when it comes to excoriating their governor. Unlike workers in several other states, they’re not used to doing it. While Quinn’s relationship with AFSCME, the two teachers’ unions and others in public-sector labor has often been strained, all sides have tended to present it as a dispute among friends.
That dynamic may have fundamentally changed with Quinn’s nixing the pay raises and with other issues this year. Even as Quinn’s decision sent AFSCME workers to court and to the picket lines, House leaders in both parties were dropping hints that they intend to take another shot during the legislature’s fall veto session at rolling back state employee pension benefits, in an effort to rein in the state’s projected pension deficit of $80 billion or more.
Those issues will play out in Springfield and the courts through the fall. AFSCME has already scored one victory, winning an arbitrator’s decision on Quinn’s refusal to approve the pay raises and suffered one defeat after a judge tossed out a union lawsuit against the state.
But whatever happens here, the Illinois showdown has already complicated the national public-union debate that’s been in play in Wisconsin and other states all year, with some ominous undertones for labor nationally.
Illinois is one place where union forces can’t claim, as they have elsewhere, that what they’re facing is just a Republican power structure cynically using fiscal excuses for the ideological goal of union-busting. When it’s Illinois Democrats, of all people, saying that traditional public-sector union rights and benefits have simply become too expensive for the taxpayer, it opens the difficult possibility for labor that it might be true.
“Here’s a guy [Quinn] who is a New Deal liberal all his life suddenly deciding to take on AFSCME, which is the strongest union in the country right now. It hurts him politically. ... Why would he do this unless he had to?” asks Chris Mooney, political scientist at the University of Illinois Springfield.
“You know what to expect from your enemies,” says Mooney, “but when your friends start talking like this, you have to consider that this is the way it is.”
It began in February in Wisconsin, which happens to have been the first state in America to give its state employees the right to collectively bargain. Walker, the new Republican governor, proposed legislation that critics said had little to do with the state’s budgetary problems and was instead designed to gut public-sector unions.
Walker proposed prohibiting collective bargaining by public employees except in wage issues; limiting raises without public referendum; restricting union rights to collect dues; and requiring higher employee contributions to health insurance and pension plans.
The resulting showdown drew intense national attention, largely because of the novel strategy of Wisconsin Senate Democrats fleeing the state, to Illinois, to prevent ruling Republicans in Madison from enacting the legislation because they wouldn’t have a quorum. The debate sparked massive pro-union demonstrations at the Wisconsin Capitol — not to mention Quinn’s Hardball appearance, which today draws charges of hypocrisy from union officials.
Wisconsin Republicans ultimately pushed through their controversial package by changing their parliamentary procedures. That success appeared to embolden other Republican leaders in other parts of the country:
- In Indiana, Republicans pushed legislation that would restrict collective bargaining and prohibit required union membership.
- In Ohio, the now-famous Senate Bill 5 went further, proposing to virtually end collective bargaining, allow the hiring of alternate workers during strikes and end binding arbitration for public employees who aren’t allowed to strike.
- In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie, a rising GOP star, engineered a major benefit reduction for some 750,000 government workers and retirees while ginning up his national profile by harshly criticizing unionized teachers at a series of town-hall meetings.
- In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott sought to limit union power to automatically deduct union dues from members’ pay checks and to impose a requirement that the members give written consent before their dues are used for political purposes.
Those and other state-union conflicts throughout the country (as many as 22 of them, some still in play) “are not isolated stories,” says Robert Bruno, professor of labor studies at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.
Bruno calls it “an epidemic” of attacks on public-sector unions and attributes much of it to a strategy by Republicans of using economic hard times as an excuse to implement long-held goals of union-busting.
“They’re certainly related to the recession and these terrible budget situations [in the states] and the 2010 elections,’’ which swept Republicans and conservative Tea Party activists into Congress and state offices, says Bruno. “It was the perfect storm. ... Unfortunately, it creates an opportunity for a lot of demagogic action.”
Less easily dismissed as demagoguery, Bruno acknowledges, is the situation in Illinois, along with New York, Connecticut and other Democrat-held states that have also moved to scale back union power, pay and benefits.
“These are not [leaders] who are anti-collective-bargaining,” says Bruno. “I think the tenor of the times, the sense of crisis being generated — or ginned-up, depending on how you view it — tends to make it hard for even friendly Democrats to see viable options” in the face of devastated state budgets.
Labor strife is traditionally the purview of coal mines and factory floors. So why is it now playing out nationally in state capitals?
Partly it’s because that’s where most of the union workers are these days.
The U.S. Labor Department reported last year that union membership in the public sector nationally was still at a hefty 36.2 percent, while in the private sector it had dropped to 6.9 percent.
In plain numbers, there were 7.6 million public-sector union members in the United States last year, outnumbering 7.1 million private-sector union members — the first time in modern history that’s happened.
That congregation of union power in the public sector comes at a time when the public sector is looking an awful lot like a bankrupt company. The whole point of unionization, from its very inception, was to provide a better life for workers, which inevitably costs more.
As Illinois and other states have literally seen the lights go out because of unpaid bills, it perhaps shouldn’t have been difficult to predict that state employee salaries and benefits — reasonable or otherwise — would eventually get fed into the sausage-grinder of public fiscal debate.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the national average cost of each employee in the private sector as of March was $28.10, including salaries and benefits. For employees in the public sector, that number was $40.54.
Some of that gap is the logical result of structural differences between governments and private companies (which have more manufacturing and sales jobs, and fewer administrative and professional positions, making their payrolls cheaper by definition). But the report shows much of the gap is due to the more generous benefits for the public sector — especially defined retirement benefits, which comprise 7.4 percent of the average cost of keeping a public-sector worker on payroll, compared with 1.5 percent for the private-sector worker.
In fact, Illinois government and the rest of the public sector is increasingly alone in providing traditional defined-benefit packages, as the private sector increasingly moves to 401(k)s and other plans that provide fewer expenses for employers (and fewer guarantees for workers).
Union officials don’t dispute that the long-term shortfall in pension funds for Illinois, as in other states, is something that has to be dealt with. However, they maintain the problem isn’t one of overly generous benefits but of elected officials who have spent decades putting off long-term pension payments to balance short-term budgets.
“Just like in other states, Wisconsin or Ohio, they’re putting the blame on state workers,” says Dwayne Hall, a Joliet-based state child protection investigator who was on the picket lines at the State Fair in August.
Especially upsetting to those employees is that the attack is coming from a normally pro-union Democrat like Quinn — and that in their eyes, it’s about a lot more than budget issues.
“It’s not just about our pay raises, it’s about collective bargaining,” says Marion Murphy, an AFSCME local president and state human services caseworker from Chicago. “Do I believe it’s an attack on unions? Yes. ... Normally, we work together [with Democratic leaders]. It’s very upsetting.”
Quinn’s response on that day was clearly an attempt to keep in place at least the idea that the historic alliance between his party and union workers is still on solid ground. He maintained that the problem is caused in part by decisions of the legislature, along with the stubborn restrictions of mathematics.
“Sometimes, you’ve got to tell friends not what they want to hear but what they need to know,” Quinn says. He waved off the suggestion that Illinois has lined up with Wisconsin, Ohio and other states that may become historically identified with an epic assault on public-sector unionism.
Illinois union officials such as AFSCME Illinois spokesman Anders Lindall, though, aren’t ruling out that possibility: “We’ve been saying all year, in the context of Wisconsin and elsewhere, that the labor movement in Illinois has faced every one of the same threats.”
Kevin McDermott is the Springfield bureau chief for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Illinois Issues, October 2011
