An Effort to ‘Shame and Pressure People’
Since the late 1970’s, union operatives have grown accustomed to using “card checks” and other organizing techniques that disparage employees’ prerogative to decide in private whether or not they will support unionization of their workplace. Today, more and more of Big Labor’s political operations also trample citizens’ privacy.
One egregious example is connected to union bosses’ attempt to recall Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker and several of his political allies in a vote taking place today.
This past weekend, people residing in the Madison and Milwaukee metropolitan areas and elsewhere in Wisconsin received unsolicited flyers from a Big Labor front group known as the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund (GWPF). People of all political stripes, including Walker supporters and those intending to sit out the recall fight as well as Walker foes, received the flyers. Very few if any of those receiving the flyers had volunteered to help the governor’s union-label Democrat challenger, Tom Barrett, with his get-out-the-vote efforts.
And yet the flyers listed the names and addresses of the recipients’ neighbors, and indicated whether or not they had voted in the November 2008 and November 2010 general elections. As University of Wisconsin law professor and commentator Ann Althouse pointed out in her well-regarded and much-visited blog, the GWPF is obviously engaging in an effort “to shame and pressure people into voting, and it is truly despicable.”
In the modern American system, it is standard practice for volunteers for political or ideological groups to go door to door to try to persuade people who have voted their way in the past to return to the polls for the latest election. But it is altogether a different thing to enlist people who haven’t expressed any interest in whether or not their neighbors vote to shame their neighbors into casting ballots in a race in which they may not support any candidate. And harassment and intimidation are manifestly what GWPF has in mind. One flyer reads, in part:
Scott Walker won in 2010 because too many people stayed home! Two years ago, more than half a million Wisconsinites who supported Obama failed to vote in the 2010 election. And that’s how Governor Scott Walker got elected. This year, we’re taking a new approach. We’re sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicize who does and does not vote.
(See the link above for more information.)
As Dr. Althouse explains, contrary to the presumption of the GWPF flyer, “Not voting is a valid choice. If you don’t have a preference in the election, don’t vote. If you think no one deserves your vote, don’t vote.”
Big Labor and its ideological cohorts engineered today’s recall elections to punish Mr. Walker and likeminded elected officials for successfully supporting passage of 2011’s Act 10, which restores the Right to Work of teachers and many other state and local government employees in Wisconsin without being forced to join or bankroll a union, and also sharply restricts the scope of most government union officials’ monopoly-bargaining privileges. All published polls and the famous Intrade prediction market are now indicating union bosses’ attempt to get revenge will fail. And the tactics to which government union chieftains and their agents are resorting to underscore the fact that Wisconsin politicians never should have authorized monopolistic public-sector unionism in the first place.