A Warning Shot at the Ballot Box for Progressive Funds
When Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, turned back the effort to recall him by winning 53 percent of the vote this month, his victory did more than ensure that the state’s cutbacks in government-worker wages, benefits, and collective-bargaining rights would remain in place. It also dashed the hopes of progressives who had come to believe that the situation in Wisconsin signaled a grand new progressive coalition, with labor unions reaching beyond their embattled borders to embrace farmers, students, pensioners, and social-service providers in defense of a generous welfare state.
As John Nichols put it in Uprising, his saga of the union-driven unrest in Wisconsin: When the “whole state” chose to “rise up in open revolt against a governor who pushed too far,” it refuted the “lie that says organized labor, social-justice movements, and democracy itself are relics to be tossed aside.”
But the Wisconsin results should raise serious questions among progressive foundations and nonprofits about the alleged identity of interests between organized labor and social-justice movements. In fact, social justice may be better served by distancing itself from the causes promoted most aggressively by public-employee unions.
This was the lesson of another election decided the same day as the Wisconsin vote. In the City of San Jose, Calif., social justice and organized labor were all too clearly at odds.
The problem: As is happening in cities and states across America, exorbitant pension costs for public employees, aggressively negotiated and defended by unions, were quickly crowding out the generous government services at the heart of liberalism.
San Jose’s retirement payments had exploded from $73-million to $245-million a year in the past decade, now consuming 20 percent of the city’s budget.