More than They Bargained For: Scott Walker, Unions, and the Fight for Wisconsin

3. “Open for Business"

S cott Walker talked frugality as he dropped a ham-and-cheese sandwich into a paper bag, explaining that he brought his lunch to work every day to help him a¤ord Wisconsin’s taxes. He was starring in one of his first ads of the campaign, and his message was clear: I pack my lunch to save money, so why can’t state government do the equivalent? The ad and others like it mingled his biography with his philosophy. In another early spot, he told voters while seated on his living room couch about his decision to take a $60,000 pay cut as Milwaukee County executive to keep government spending down. “My wife was like, ‘We’re doing what?’” Walker said into the camera . In still another ad, he talked from behind the wheel about how he’d saved money by hanging onto his 1998 Saturn with more than 100,000 miles on it. In ads and campaign speeches, he urged voters to join a “brown-bag movement ” for frugality in government, creating a website with that name and passing out paper lunch sacks at campaign stops. Democrats dismissed the ads as lightweights and no real answer to a state facing the worst economic times since the Great Depression. They noted that while Walker gave up part of his county executive pay during his first term, he allowed it to rise later by $50,000 a year. He may have had sack lunches and an old car, but he still had a nice suburban house and the same dinners that other statewide candidates had with wealthy donors at high-end restaurants . Democrats also pointed out that the brown-bag theme was recycled from the 1998 U.S. Senate run of George Voinovich of Ohio, who had the same campaign consultant. But just as he had in his county executive race, Walker found a simple message and stuck with it. 3  “Open for Business” 22 Walker wasn’t just preaching frugality for himself. He talked openly during the campaign about how he believed that state workers should pay more for their benefits, and Wisconsin Republicans hadn’t always taken that approach. During the booming 1990s, GOP Governor Tommy Thompson preferred to keep unions close rather than push them away, at one stage fattening their pensions along with his own. After forcing out Walker during the 2006 governor ’s race, Mark Green also avoided taking on the unions, which had a bloc of ready voters and, more important, campaign cash. Green even attempted unsuccessfully to keep AFSCME neutral in the 2006 election. By contrast, Walker made the issue a hallmark of his campaign. In a conference call with reporters exactly one year before election day, Walker pledged to reverse the tax increases approved by Democrats that year—a promise that he, as governor , turned away from in part so he could pursue other tax cuts that he considered more important. He also pledged to use cuts to employee wages and benefits to help o¤set the lost revenue. As the campaign progressed, Walker described public workers as “haves” siphoning money from average taxpayers who were “have nots.” “Public-sector employees have been the untouchables ,” he said during one debate. Nonetheless, Walker never mentioned the notion of wiping away nearly all collective bargaining for public workers. He was more candid than most candidates about wanting to slim down government, but he withheld many of the specifics of how he would make his campaign rhetoric a reality. If the state’s bargaining laws remained largely in place—and Walker never suggested they wouldn’t—he would have to extract concessions from employees through negotiations. Many expected tough talks, with employees resisting cuts and Walker reprising his county executive tactics of threatening to outsource thousands of jobs and impose long furloughs if he couldn’t get the concessions . No one—not the media, not Walker’s opponents, not even the unions themselves—seemed to guess that he might seek to eliminate collective bargaining . Had Walker put forward his labor proposal during the campaign itself, his path would have been more diªcult because unions and their members would have been even more active in spending money, volunteering, and voting against him. As it was, his campaign succeeded in getting him elected, but it failed to fully prepare state residents for his agenda. Because the public never saw how far Walker was willing to go, his talk of massive savings seemed...