Will Big Labor Get Its Revenge in Wisconsin?

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Government union bosses and their militant followers hate Gov. Scott Walker for supporting public employees' Right to Work.

Roughly a year ago, Wisconsin and Ohio became the first two states to adopt statutes revoking government union officials’ power to force employees to pay union dues, or be fired, after having first granted Big Labor this privilege legislatively. In Ohio, unfortunately, the union hierarchy was able to use a multi-million-dollar referendum strategy to prevent the new public-sector Right to Work law from taking effect and ultimately to overturn it last November. But so far union officials’ attempts to kill Wisconsin’s Act 10, which prevents most government union bosses from getting employees terminated for refusal to pay union dues or fees and sharply limits Big Labor’s monopoly-bargaining privileges in most public-sector agencies, have failed.

As the Orange County (Calif.) Register editorial linked above notes, Wisconsin taxpayers and students, as well as independent-minded teachers, are now benefiting from Act 10. But union kingpins remain determined to get revenge against the elected officials who support this measure and recover all of their forced-dues privileges. Their latest mode of attack is a set of “recall†elections scheduled for June 5. As the editorial notes:

The recall campaign . . . transcends Wisconsin and, as noted before, if the recall effort succeeds . . . , efforts nationwide at reforming pensions and other issues pitting the interests of taxpayers against those of public-sector unions will be damaged.

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