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Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her allies in the state legislature are seeking to use millions of dollars intended for struggling homeowners to pay for prison construction and tax cuts instead, echoing a policy put in place earlier this year in Wisconsin by Governor Scott Walker.

Remember the $26 billion foreclosure settlement, the one agreed upon by the five biggest banks and 49 state Attorneys General? As one of the hardest his states, Arizona is getting $1.6 billion, as well as an additional $97.7 million to be overseen by the office of Attorney General Tom Horne, to be used for “housing counselors, legal aid, hotlines, and to help stressed homeowners with their payments.”

Two main things to understand about these funds: they are wildly insufficient given the scale of the problem, but all the same they are extremely crucial. In March, Arizona had the highest foreclosure rate in the country, according to RealtyTrac, with 9,497 foreclosures. If any state needs all the help it can get when it comes to homeowner education, assistance, and relief, it’s Arizona.

Even so, Governor Brewer and Republican state legislators want to siphon $50 million from those funds to “relieve pressure on the budget.” So in other words, use money intended to help homeowners for…other things.

Lawmakers say the money amounts to a pricey outreach and education fund. It won’t hurt to take half of it, House Speaker Andy Tobin said.

“We’re using the funds to relieve the pressure on the budget,” said Tobin, R-Paulden. Those stresses range from a push to replace welfare dollars lost to federal budget cuts to prison construction, he said.

How is this justified? You can thank a loophole in the settlement language, which says the funds can be used “to compensate the state for costs resulting from the alleged unlawful conduct of the defendants.” Arizona lawmakers like House Speaker Tobin are claiming that since foreclosure fraud hurt homeowners, which in turn hurt tax revenues and by extension the state budget, they can use the money for whatever they damn well please. (more…)

“It was the most humiliating experience of my life.”

That’s how Elizabeth Brown, a former employee in the governor’s office in Arizona, described the day a manager told her that her services were no longer needed. “The worst part was getting walked out of the building. They watched me pack up my stuff while I cried.” That was 14 months ago and Brown, age 57, has not been able to find another job in Arizona’s lagging recovery. But Brown knew when she started her job in constituent services with then-Gov. Janet Napolitano’s office that, as a political hire, her employment was purely at the whim of whomever was in office. When Napolitano left Arizona to join the Obama administration in 2009, then-Secretary of State Jan Brewer stepped in. Brown was one of few Democrats who wasn’t fired immediately and replaced with Republicans.

“I felt really lucky and I wanted to make sure I did a good job and got along with everybody, no matter what party the people I was working with were.” She got glowing performance reviews and even a promotion to a position with more responsibility. So when she was fired, “I asked her [the manager] to tell me why and she just looked at me. So I said it’s because I have a D by name, right?” Brown says that being summarily fired with no reason given still hurts her to this day, even knowing as she did that she was an at-will employee and could be let go at any time.

If Gov. Brewer gets her way, all state employees, including those currently covered by civil service protections (about 75 percent), will be in Brown’s position. Brewer’s office claims that Arizona’s merit system, which requires the state to show cause to fire a worker and workers have the ability to appeal termination, makes the state government bloated and inefficient. They say that an at-will system will reward the most talented performers and allow departments to shed substandard employees. But state departments have always had the ability to terminate bad workers. The merit system protected public servants, and the public, from a state government run by cronies and patronage hires. As Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini put it: “How would you react if you heard about a politician who got a longtime government employee fired because he’d promised the guy’s job to the nincompoop nephew of a big campaign donor?”

This attack on public workers comes (surprise!) straight from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Goldwater Institute. It was Goldwater’s “in depth, investigative report” in 2010 that was used to justify it. The bill passed the House today and is expected to pass the GOP majority Senate next week.

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Donna Gratehouse has been blogging for Democratic Diva since 2007. She writes about local and national politics with a strong emphasis on women’s issues.

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This is republished from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog.

As Arizona’s “Wisconsin on Steroids” anti-worker bills get streamlined through committee hearings, Arizona labor leaders are gearing up to push back. This afternoon, I spoke with Roman Ulman, executive director of AFSCME Arizona. Ulman told me union leaders are still meeting with legislators at this point, urging them to support working families over corporate interests. As he said:

Senators on both sides of the aisle are telling me they are uncomfortable with the bills and are pleased that we’re talking and not walking at this point. Some of the Republicans have privately expressed to me that they’re tired of being terrorized by the Goldwater Institute and the Tea Party into voting for bad legislation. They want to focus on the budget and solving Arizona’s problems.

(Click here to sign a petition to tell all Arizona lawmakers to stop the attacks on firefighters, teachers, police officers and other hard-working public service workers.)

Private conversations aside, even the more principled Republican lawmakers in Arizona have a history of caving under under corporate pressure so it is expected that the majority will vote for the bills in the end. Ulman says union members and allies are prepared for that.

If it moves out of the Senate, all bets are off and we will march and take our case to the public.

Labor and community groups plan to hold a press conference on the lawn of the State Capitol in Phoenix today and are expecting a good sized crowd to turn out. (more…)

The common thread in yesterday’s unbroken string of Democratic and progressive victories was the popular rejection of right-wing overreach. From Ohio, where voters overturned by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent Republican Governor John Kasich’s law stripping public employees of collective-bargaining rights; to Maine, where voters overturned by a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent Republican Governor Paul LePage’s law abolishing Election Day voter registration; to Arizona, where voters recalled Republican state Senate Leader Russell Pearce, the most vehemently anti-immigrant state legislator in the nation; to, will-wonders-never-cease, Mississippi, where voters rejected an initiative declaring a fertilized egg a person from the moment of conception, effectively outlawing abortion and just maybe birth control as well, by a decisive margin of 57 percent to 43 percent, voters shouted a resounding STOP to the rightward gallop of public policy at the hands of the radicalized Republican Party.

The series of elections held across the country yesterday weren’t supposed to yield a coherent narrative. The key ballot measures concerned very different issues, and they were on the ballot in very different states. Yet a common theme emerged: Radical-right Republicans hit a wall last night all over the country, even on a conservative social issue in what may be the most socially conservative state in the nation.

Like many Republicans elected one year ago, John Kasich and Paul LePage stormed into their respective statehouses aiming to transform their moderate states into laboratories for diminished democracy, with Kasich proposing to curtail the right to bargain collectively and LePage proposing to curtail the right to vote. Clearly, they did not bring their states’ voters along with them, and Kasich, in some polls, has become the least popular governor in the nation by turning so deaf an ear to his constituents’ beliefs. (more…)

By Michael Winship
Former senior writer at Bill Moyers Journal on PBS

“More cheese, less sleaze!”

That was the funniest group chant at Tuesday’s rally of several hundred union and other progressive activists outside the Manhattan headquarters of Fox News.

Several “cheeseheads” were in attendance, their noggins topped by the now familiar wedge-shaped, orange hatwear made popular by Green Bay Packer fans. On Tuesday they were out in the twilight chill expressing their opposition not to lactose intolerance but Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s intolerance of organized labor. (Unadorned by cheddar, I briefly spoke at the gathering as president of an AFL-CIO affiliated union, the Writers Guild of America, East.)

Governor Walker continues his obdurate opposition to the state’s public employee unions’ right to collective bargaining, despite a willingness on their part to concede pension and health givebacks he claims would help close Wisconsin’s alleged deficit. Meanwhile, there has been a decided increase on the sleaze end of the cheese vs. sleaze quotient, as evidenced in part by the prank phone call to the governor in which an online newspaper editor impersonating right wing billionaire David Koch elicited from Walker a proposed scheme to lure back, then double cross Democratic state senators who have prevented a quorum by retreating to Illinois. Further, when asked about planting troublemakers amongst the protesters, Walker told the trickster that he and his team had “thought about that” but decided not to. Apparently, all the really good disrupters are tied up in the Middle East. (more…)

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

While most voters were focused on the economy in Tuesday’s elections, a corporate front group slipped in constitutional amendments in four states—Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah—in an orchestrated attempt to pre-empt the proposed federal Employee Free Choice Act. If enacted, the Employee Free Choice Act would give workers more options when they consider joining a union.

The four so-called “Secret Ballot” Amendments all contained similar language. For example, the Arizona measure, known as Prop. 113, would “guarantee” the right to vote by secret ballot in “elections for public office or public votes on initiatives or referenda, or designations or authorizations of employee representation.”

The most recent version of the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 1409, S. 560) was introduced last year and has languished in Congress. In 2007, the measure passed the House but failed to clear procedural hurdles in the Senate. (more…)

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act were dealt a blow June 30 when an Arizona state court judge struck down as unconstitutional a proposed state constitutional amendment that sought to restrict how workers can vote in union representation elections. 

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Robert Oberbillig granted an injunction sought by Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 99 to prevent Proposition 108 from appearing on the ballot in November. The proposition, which was backed by the anti-union group Save our Secret Ballot (SOS Ballot), would have required secret ballots in all union elections and elections for public office. Employee Free Choice Act opponents wrongly claim the legislation would take away the right to a secret ballot election for union representation. In fact, the act would give workers—not employers—the option to choose whether to vote on union representation by signing union authorization cards. (more…)