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By Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large, The American Prospect

While hardly surprising to anyone who read the polls, yesterday’s victory by Republican Governor Scott Walker was a body blow to Wisconsin unions and to American workers. Within Wisconsin, Walker’s victory ensures that his law repealing collective-bargaining rights for public employees will stay on the books, and if Republicans maintain their hold on the state senate—four of their senators faced recall elections, and as I write this at least three have survived—they will, at least in theory, be able to go forward on other parts of their Social Darwinist agenda. Whether they will—and whether they opt to go after private-sector unions, too, with right-to-work legislation—remains unclear. Such a move on Walker’s part, coming on the heels of the most divisive 18 months in the state’s history, would only escalate what is already a political civil war. Even Walker may think it the better part of valor to pass on that for now.

But the damage already done by Walker’s anti-union legislation, which eliminated public employee unions’ ability to automatically collect dues from its members’ paychecks, is vast. A May 30 article in the Wall Street Journal reported that membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a union founded in Wisconsin in 1936, had declined in state from 62,818 in March 2011 to 28,745 in February of this year. Membership in the American Federation of Teachers had declined in-state from 17,000 to 11,000, the article reported. The membership numbers for Wisconsin’s largest public-sector union, the National Education Association, are not available.

Added to the prohibition on their ability to bargain over wages and conditions of work, what the dramatic drop in union membership means is that workers’ power to win a decent life either at the workplace or at the ballot box will be weakened. Union treasuries will grow smaller, as will the level of resources they can devote to election campaigns. That means not just less money to campaign for union-specific issues, but for the whole panoply of causes (and the candidates who back them) that unions routinely support—women’s and minority rights, affordable higher education, financial regulation, the works.

The larger question coming out of Wisconsin is whether the result will embolden other Republican governors to go down this path. Some, of course, have already tried and been soundly rebuffed, most particularly Ohio’s John Kasich, whose own law repealing his state’s public employee bargaining rights was overturned by referendum last November by a 61-percent-to-39-percent margin. I’ve attempted on this blog to analyze why the outcomes were so different, especially since Wisconsin is by every measure a more liberal state than Ohio. I’ve noted that Ohio union activists had the ability to wage a timely referendum campaign, while Wisconsin law has no provision for referendums, and the recall—a more complicated question—had to wait more than a year before being put before state voters. (more…)

By Doug Foote
Social Media Specialist at Working America

On June 5th, voters in Wisconsin will go to the polls in an historic recall election, where they will decide who will serve as Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and State Senator in several districts for the rest of the current term. Nearly all the elected officials targeted by recall, who are in danger of being removed from office on the June 5th ballot, have something else in common: past or present affiliation with the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.

At the center of the firestorm is Governor Scott Walker, who earned the ire of Wisconsin voters for his relentless drive to restrict collective bargaining rights for 350,000 state workers, as well as his negligence toward Wisconsin’s job crisis. But before he became a household name, Walker served in the State Assembly from 1993-2002, where he was an ALEC member from 1995-1998.

During that time, Walker worked with fellow ALEC politician Governor Tommy Thompson to pass a model “Truth in Sentencing Bill,” which was developed by ALEC’s now-shuttered Public Safety and Elections Task Force. The bill required all criminal defendants to serve “no less than 85 percent” of the sentence imposed. For those convicted of violent crime, the bill called for them to serve 100 percent of the sentence imposed by the court; no parole, and no chance for early release.

This bill was developed specifically to benefit an ALEC member corporation, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which for many years housed overflow Wisconsin inmates in other states. CCA was on ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force at the time. (more…)

With so many extremist governors in office today, it’s hard to determine who is The Worst Governor Ever. Cast your vote at worstgovernorever.com.
It’s time America came to this vital decision together. Who is The Worst Governor Ever? www.worstgovernorever.com

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

There are rotten apples in every industry. Or perhaps I should say rotten eggs.

One especially rotten egg is Jack DeCoster, whose commercial egg agribusiness, which goes under the homey title “Wright County Egg,” headquartered in Galt, Iowa, sends eggs all over the country under many different brands. Those eggs have now laid low thousands of Americans with salmonella poisoning, and may well infect thousands more.

DeCoster is recalling 380 million eggs sold since mid-May. Another commercial egg company, also headquartered in Iowa, and in which DeCoster is a major investor, is recalling hundreds millions more.

It’s not clear how rotten eggs are recalled. They’re not like Toyotas. They’re already in our food supply.

But this is only the beginning of the story. (more…)