Susan Flood says she will gladly subtract $4,000 in pension and health premiums from her take-home pay next year in exchange for not having to pay roughly $800 in union dues.
Few of her fellow teachers at Brookwood Elementary School in the Genoa City District share her view of Wisconsin's new public sector labor law, which soon will affect the paychecks of thousands of public employees, Flood said.
But she is a Republican who has been required for 19 years to pay dues to a union she views as promoting mediocrity and high taxes. So when the law stripped public employees of most union rights this year, she celebrated.
"They say the union is there to stand up for you," Flood said. "Well, no one has ever had to stand up for me. I think I stand up for myself by doing my job."
Unions are hoping people like Flood are a small minority of their members, now that the law no longer allows automatic payroll deductions for government workers' union dues. Instead, they're counting on members to continue supporting the unions by authorizing voluntary bank drafts to cover dues.
Rick Badger, executive director of AFSCME Council 40, which represents 32,000 local government workers in the state outside Milwaukee County, was upbeat about the union's prospects but acknowledged there's no way to know how many workers will ante up.
"It's important that we get that participation," Badger said. "That's going to sustain the union for what may be a couple years until we can change this thing."
Paulette Feld, president of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, said she expected dues signup efforts to pick up after this summer's recall elections. Union leaders are focused on trying to remove six Republican state senators who supported the collective bargaining law while defending three Democrats who fled the state to delay a vote on the measure.
Some lower-wage workers will have a hard time paying dues, and others will say no for political reasons, Feld said, "but people I run into have been saying to me that they are going to be getting their information in."
Money in their pocket?
When he introduced his plan to dramatically roll back collective bargaining for public employees, Gov. Scott Walker said the plan would have the support of many union members, who had no say under the old rules on whether their dues would be automatically deducted.
"That school teacher now will no longer have to pay a thousand dollars taken out of their paycheck," Walker told the Wisconsin Radio Network in March. "That's money that they can use to pay for health care and other things like that."
But those savings will be more than offset by the higher contributions now required of employees for their pensions and health care premiums. The law also requires annual union recertification votes and forbids collective bargaining on things such as vacations, sick pay, seniority preferences, overtime and grievance procedures.
The State Journal contacted Walker's office and several Republican state legislators for names of public workers willing to talk about their support for the GOP-backed union law, but few came forward.
Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, said he has spoken to prison guards and teachers who have thanked him for helping pass Act 10, but they won't go public because they fear disapproval or harassment from co-workers who fought bitterly to defeat the bill.
Not everyone feels intimidated.
Kristi Lacroix is a Kenosha teacher who has been openly critical of her union for years. Recently, with the help of the National Right to Work Legal Foundation and other conservative groups, she filed a brief in federal court supporting the Wisconsin labor law against a union lawsuit.
Lacroix said she was nervous, but nobody gave her a hard time. She remains friends with her local union president and said she thinks Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, is "awesome."
She acknowledged that union contracts have boosted her standard of living, but she is a Republican who agrees with Walker that the new law is needed to control government costs, even if it reduces her pay.
"Does it stink? Yes, but I'm a taxpayer, too," Lacroix said.
Satisfaction is key
About 4,000 local government workers and teachers in about half of the state's teacher unions will begin to see the effects of the new law in their paychecks this month. Some 22,000 state workers without contracts will notice the changes beginning with their Aug. 25 paychecks. Members of other school and municipal unions will be affected as their contracts expire.
Whether they opt to continue representation will likely depend on two factors, said Jack Fiorito, a Florida State University business professor who specializes in research on member attitudes toward their unions: a feeling they have some say in the organization, and a belief that the union can make a difference in significant matters.
"What I think a lot of those unhappy members may discover, however, is that while public sector unions have limited power, they will be even less influential if workers do not support them," Fiorito said.
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